Volume XI: 2014-2015 by History Students' Association

The of

Future

History Volume XI

The Future of History: Volume XI

The

Future

of History 2014-2015 Volume XI

Staff & Credits

Journal Directors: McAlister, India Grace O’Shaughnessy, Haley

Managing Editor: Allain, Jaqueline

General Editors: Brade, Emily Federica, Adriana Katz, Emily Osman, Hana

Layout and Design: Chen, Rachel Workewych, Adriana Printing: Coach House Books

It would not have been possible to publish this year’s edition of The Future of History without the generous contributions of: Arts & Science Student Union at the University of Toronto, The University of Toronto History Students’ Association, The Faculty of Arts & Science Dean’s Student Initiative Fund, The Department of History at the University of Toronto, and Trinity College Meeting

Introduction

After reviewing 55 submissions, our Editorial Board has chosen six papers that we believe represent the University of Toronto’s Department of History at its finest. In a small protest against Eurocentrism and conservative historiographies within the academy, this issue emphasized cultural histories, the histories of gender, and regional histories which seek to resist colonialism of all forms. We begin with Sydney Gautreau’s work on the temporally distinct but spatially similar St. John’s Ward and Old Chinatown. Gautreau’s discourse analysis explains how racialized narratives in Toronto became entrenched by space more so than time. Our second selection, Sohee Chin’s “Women in the Baltics” chronicles the changing constructions of femininity in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with an emphasis on the lasting impact of Soviet discourse on Baltic feminisms. Next we have Jennifer Berg’s “Blended Iconography” which examines the syncretism of Indigenous and Catholic beliefs within Spanish American art. Our fourth selection is Natasha Richichi-Fried’s historiographical paper, which seeks to challenge the androcentric narrative of early modern Jewish history. Then we turn to Macro Perez’s paper on the cultural landscape of Istanbul during the nineteenth century, one that both resisted and incorporated Western aesthetics. We end our annual edition with Kevin Lunianga’s “A Medium for Change, A Medium for Hate” which discusses the uses and abuses of the radio during the Algerian Revolution and the Rwandan Genocide. We would like to thank our entire editorial staff, particularly our Managing Editor Jacqueline Allain, and our Design Editors Rachel Chen and Adriana Workewych for their exceptional job. Equally, we would like to thank our financial supporters and the students who provided us with a wonderful range of submissions. We encourage everyone to submit their essays for The Future of History’s special issue on the topic, “Revolutions, Resistance, and Social Movements.”

Haley O’Shaughnessy and India Grace McAlister 1

Table of Contents What if a Slum Was Demolished to Build New City Hall and No One Even Knew About It?

Sydney Gautreau........................3

Women in the Baltic States

Sohee Chin...................................16

The Blended Iconography of Early Modern Spanish American Art

Jennifer Berg.............................24

Challenging an Androcentric Master Narrative: Re-inscribing the Voices of Jewish Women into Early Modern History

Natasha Richichi-Fried.......31

Where East meets the West: Istanbul during the Nineteenth Century

Marcos Perez............................41

A Medium for Change, A Medium for Hate: The Uses and Abuses of Radio during the Algerian Revolution and the Rwandan Genocide

Kevin Lunianga.......................49

What if a Slum was Demolished to Build a New City Hall and No One Even Knew About It? By Sydney Gautreau Toronto, it seems, has a history problem. Specifically, it has a selective memory. Since Toronto’s “founding moment,” the 1834 Incorporation of Toronto—writing the 1787 Toronto Purchase from the Mississaugas of the New Credit firmly out of the dominant narrative of Torontonian history and into a perpetual cycle of the erasure of Aboriginal history1 —this city has had a succession of explicit and implicit monikers: “Toronto the Good,” “Toronto the Progressive,” and “Toronto the Multicultural.” These monikers have been largely culturally accepted, meaning that Toronto’s uncritical self-perception has allowed it to tout itself as an angel of refuge for immigrants to incorporate themselves into our colourful, cultural mosaic of a city—a racism-free oasis of equal opportunity where all are welcome, diversity is encouraged, with a reputation as pure and as white as its founding fathers. Accordingly, Toronto’s dominant historical narrative is as nice, bland, and uninformed as the global perception of the country it sits in. Central to this historical project is a collective cultural memory that forgets, glosses over, and erases historical processes that serve to challenge that façade. In the process, those who have been marginalized and dispossessed become forgotten, glossed over, and erased. This paper is an attempt to challenge that narrative by constructing an alternative narrative, one that brings the immigrant experiences of St. John’s Ward and Old Chinatown into sharp focus; it will attempt to show that the expropriation, demolition, and subsequent dispossession of more than five hundred citizens to build Civic Square and New City Hall was the continuation of a legacy of discriminatory public discourse and policy that began with “the Ward” in the late nineteenth century.2 In the 1940s and 1950s, the area bounded by Yonge Street, Queen Street, University Avenue, and College Street was no longer conceptualized as a hotbed of immorality, vice, and sin against which the rest of Toronto could construct itself as “Toronto the Good;” instead, Old Chinatown was demolished to construct an image of “Toronto the Progressive.” The fact that this event is nearly erased from collective cultural memory is an illustration of historian Doreen Massey’s assertion that historical memory is a means of naturalizing the political present: the act of ignoring enables the acceptance of and complacency toward dispossession of immigrant and lower-income citizens in a housing crisis that, according to historian Sean Purdy, has gone for over a hundred years.3 Regrettably, this paper comes with a caveat: many of the issues, themes, and events addressed in this paper are insufficiently treated due to space. The

historical and historiographical project attempted here could easily fill many volumes. It is merely a start. Historiographically, this paper is an attempt to do something new. St. John’s Ward and Old Chinatown are geographically united but temporally separated; together they represent a geopolitically charged area that, from the late nineteenth century through to 1955, represented one of Toronto’s largest immigrant districts. They occupied the same space at different times, and as a result, they are typically treated as distinct neighbourhoods. Looking at the two neighbourhoods in a singular narrative, however, permits analysis of patterns of similarity and continuation. These patterns include: the emergence of a “host versus immigrant” mentality which informed the host community’s perceptions of foreigners and allowed the community to construct its own identity; the expropriation and demolition of immigrant districts during housing crises that facilitated the erection of public buildings; the way in which policies and public discourse constructed and reified racist perceptions of immigrants in the city; and the role of morality and paternalism in the perception of immigrants. This paper will first look at the history of the Ward and how it was conceived and constructed in public discourse, second trace out the origins of the nascent Chinese community in Toronto and the formation of Old Chinatown, third look at how the discourse surrounding its demolition was the discriminatory legacy of the Ward re-conceptualized, concluding with a discussion of the event’s erasure from collective cultural memory and the problematic repercussions this has. The area bounded by Yonge, Queen, University, and College was originally called “Macauley town,” and was already subdivided by the mid-1800s. It was primordially considered a slum, a cultural status that was confirmed by the Toronto House of Industry—the “poor house”—at Elm and Chestnut streets.4 St. John’s Ward was demarcated in 1853,but after 1891 it became part of a much larger civic union, Ward 3.5 The label “the Ward,” however, remained with the St. John’s portion.6 Most of the buildings populating the area were one and two-story stucco cottages built in the 1850s-1860s; the streets were close and narrow with a variety of laneways and alleys, such as Albert Lane, later infamous for its facilitation of clandestine homosexual activity.7 The population of the area was predominantly English speaking, but the assassination of Czar Alexander II in Russia in March 1881 would drastically change the demographic makeup of the Ward and Jewish diaspora at-large.8 The Jewish population was wrongly blamed for the Czar’s assassination, and to escape the subsequent pogroms and countryside rioting, there was large-scale immigration of primarily Eastern European Jews to North America, swelling the Torontonian Jewish population from 3000 in 1901, to 9000 in 1907, to over 18 000 in 1911. According to historian John Speisman, the immigrants who arrived from Eastern Europe settled, almost without exception, in the Ward. The area provided the necessary cheap accommodation and proximity to employment—various factories and the

existing garment industry.9 Moreover, as a result of unemployment, high taxes, poor farm land, and few resources, millions of Italians emigrated from their country of origin to North America between 1860-1914, many of who settled in the Ward.10 According to historian John C. Weaver, by 1901 Ward 3 contained 99 per cent of the city’s Jewish population, 78 per cent of the city’s black population, 75 per cent of the city’s Italian population, and 62 per cent of the city’s Chinese population. Given that the wider net of Ward 3 included large, Anglo-Saxon homes near Queen’s Park, this highlights a higher concentration of immigrants in the Ward than indicated by the census. Thus, “the Ward” became “shorthand designation for Toronto’s Foreign Quarter.”11 According to historian Allan Levine, whether they wanted to or not, the immigrant minority attracted a lot of attention as a result of ingrained xenophobia that characterized Canadian society for much of the twentieth century.12 Moreover, historian Mariana Valverde asserts that from the 1890s well into the 1920s, the slum was defined, not just as an economic and public health problem, but also as a moral problem.13 Central to the social construction of the slum in the early twentieth century is the correlation between immigrants, urban poverty, and vice. Municipal authorities did not impose limits upon how many people could live in one structure, and as a result large families and boarders would fill the small houses, usually to supplement income. In 1911, there were 82 people per acre—a higher density than any other part of the city, except Cabbagetown; in the same year, the Hastings report discovered that 108 houses were unfit for human habitation, and in 1916, the health department discovered that 35 houses had no water supply. According to Weaver, the substandard housing became identified with aliens.14 Slum vice was believed to be a result of the moral degradation that occurred due to overcrowding—the worst of which, the most “unspeakable,” was incest and sexual abuse of children, colloquially called “lodger evil.” These circular associations of the immigrant population with poverty, vice, crime, and immorality were cultivated in public and popular discourse. The Ward was treated by “Toronto the Good” as “a blemish whose foreign contagion was best kept from the sanctity of the suburbs.”15 According to Levine, “‘foreign trash,’ ‘heathens,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘indolent social parasites,’ and ‘foreign scum,’ were just a few of the ‘colourful’ ways the newcomers were contemptuously depicted in speeches, government documents, newspapers, and magazine articles.”16 The Globe ran an article asserting that the situation would improve once the foreigners were taught the value of sanitation. This constant process of “othering” was underpinned by attempts by “Toronto the Good” to “make good Canadians” out of the immigrants—completely ignoring economic forces and instead blaming the slum conditions and the moral repercussions that went along with it entirely on cultural ones.17 The municipal government attempted to enforce regulations that exerted “Canadian culture,” for example the enforcement of the Lord’s Day in the predominantly Jewish district.18 Institutionally, special schools for foreign children were created in the Ward, where the teachers encouraged their

pupils to learn English, and imparted to the immigrant students “correct moral values.” Alternatively, there was ample evidence of desire for eradication of the slum altogether, despite the acute housing shortage outlined in the Hastings report and represented by the severe overcrowding. University of Toronto professor Ramsay Wright described the Ward as “a cancer of the modern civic organism,” and Reverend H.S. Magee described the slum as “the festering sore of our city life.”19 Weaver points out that according to a 1918 study of poverty, to the rest of the majority Protestant population, the Ward “constituted ‘a condition, an attitude of mind toward life, a standard of living— not merely a geographic locality.’” Moreover, civic reformers whose mandate was beautification of “Toronto the Good” hoped that it would be “wiped out.”20 In 1911, this process began in the form of expropriation and dispossession of the low-income, immigrant citizens of the Ward; the area bounded by Elizabeth Street, Albert Street (formerly the aforementioned Albert Lane), Louisa Street, and Chestnut Street was expropriated and cleared to build the Registry Office, and a large block of land at College and Elizabeth was cleared to build Toronto General Hospital.21 In a 1909 feature on the Ward in Canadian Magazine, a journalist expressed relief that a hospital—an “enemy” of dirt and disease— was being constructed. Moreover, Dr. Charles K. Clarke, well-known psychiatrist, ran a clinic out of TGH that studied the connections between “feeblemindedness, illicit sexuality, and venereal disease.” According to Levine, this was no coincidence.22 By constructing the Ward as a moral problem in public and popular discourse, the Protestant majority of Toronto was able to create the “host versus immigrant” civic mentality that informed the discriminatory perceptions based around overcrowding, immorality, and poverty. Despite a perpetual housing crisis, the overcrowded slum housing was demolished to erect public buildings. Thus began the pattern of expropriation, demolition, and resulting displacement of immigrant citizens during acute housing crises in the Ward area. The targeted population demographic of the Ward changed again after 1911, however, when the area reached its “apex” of its development as a Jewish area. After a 1904 fire destroyed much of the manufacturing district and the prospering Jewish population began moving to the better neighbourhoods west of University Avenue,23 the nascent Chinese Canadian population began moving in. Sam Ching was the first Chinese person to be recorded in the Toronto City Directory in 1878; he owned a laundry at 9 Adelaide St. East.24 In 1881, only 22 Chinese people lived in the province of Ontario, perhaps half of whom lived in Toronto, as one quarter of the laundries listed in the city directory of this year were Chinese.25 Settlements and businesses remained scattered until 1900, when large waves of immigrants, arriving from western Canada as a result of anti-Chinese attitudes, agitated for the establishment of a “so-called Chinatown.”26 By 1890 there were 34 laundries and by 1901 there were 95—by this point three quarters of the laundries in Toronto were owned by the

Chinese and new ones continued to open every few blocks for the next twenty years. According to historian Richard H. Thompson, the years 19001923 represent “the growth of the traditional community in Toronto.”27 During 1910-1915 a discernable Chinatown area emerged in Toronto directly adjacent to the Ward, and as the increasingly prosperous Jewish population began moving to the Kensington Market area, the stores and buildings began to be occupied by the Chinese.28 In 1901 there were approximately 758 Chinese people in Ontario, and by 1921 there were 5394. By the mid 1920s, the area that became known as “Chinatown” was centered along Elizabeth Street between Queen and Dundas.29 This increasing Chinese immigrant presence alarmed “Toronto the Good,” and resulted in vociferously discriminatory attitudes and policies. A variety of anti-Chinese editorials were published as early as the 1880s, with politicians, newspapers, and labour groups calling for restrictions on Chinese labour. Moreover, despite being a smaller population than the Jews and Italians, the Chinese were viewed as more ominous by city leaders because they were “un-assimilable.” In December 1896, an article in the Star accused Chinese laundrymen of using low prices to steal business from their white counterparts, as well as suggesting they were spreading disease.30 In 1907 the Globe claimed, “the average Oriental is dangerous and injuriously inferior to the average Canadian.”31 Furthermore, historians Carolyn Strange and Elise Chenier both argue that because of the “bachelor society” created by immigration patterns, reinforced by discriminatory immigration policy that will be detailed below, Chinese men were socially constructed as a sexual danger to white women.32 The xenophobia and racism of the court system of the time worked to connect “dangerous foreign strangers” to fears about vice, poverty, and crime—most potent of which was the fear of the “yellow peril” and narratives of white slavery.33 These discriminatory attitudes represented in the popular and public discourse were internalized, reified, and recapitulated in a series of fundamentally racist government policies. After agitation by the aforementioned newspapers, politicians, and labour groups, the Dominion government was pressured into the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act, which imposed a $50.00 head tax on incoming immigrants, which in 1903 was increased to $500.00. As a result, few Chinese immigrants could afford to enter Canada. In 1914, as a result of the hysteria stemming from fears of Chinese men using opium to sexually exploit white women, an amendment was made to the Factory, Shop, and Building Act that prohibited Chinese businesses, especially restaurants, from hiring white women.34 It was, ironically, the year when the number of Chinese restaurants and laundries reached its peak in the history of the community, that the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act was passed, prohibiting further Chinese immigration to Canada. It was enacted on July 1, Canada’s Dominion Day—the humiliating timing was thought to signal a “slow death for Chinese Canadian communities.”35 Only 44 Chinese people entered Canada between 1923 and 1944, and between 1931 and 1941 the Torontonian Chinese population

decreased by more than 400. The pièce de résistance of the discriminatory legislation was that, prior to the Canadian Citizenship act of 1947, most Chinese immigrants could not qualify for Canadian citizenship because they did not speak English.36 Despite the population decrease from the 1920s to the 1940s, the reports on Housing Conditions in Toronto in 1934, 1942-1943, and 1948 collectively comprise an echoing refrain of the 1911 Hastings report and the subsequent 1918 study on poverty. The three reports from the 1930s and 1940s all stress the extremely dire housing shortage for the low-income populations. The Report of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Committee on Housing Conditions in 1934 deplored the horrible conditions of the poor and those living in low-rent income housing, and that the Ward area was filled with “bad houses,” overcrowded and verminous as a result of a “serious housing shortage.”37 The Report of the City Council’s Survey Committee on Housing Conditions in Toronto 1942-1943 found that there was an “acute and urgent housing problem,” especially in the field of low-income rental housing; it stressed that it was not a temporary problem that would be resolved at the end of the war, and that if nothing was done to rectify it, it would severely worsen. The 1942-1943 report identifies the “crux” of the problem as the amount of housing that was unfit for human habitation—a problem clearly unresolved since Hastings identified 108 of the same in 1911—and accordingly the report urged that the houses be demolished and replaced with new houses suitable for low-rental prices.38 Humphrey Carver’s study of Housing Problems in the Toronto Area from five years later restates the exact same problem, but articulates the issue most coherently: “slum conditions are the ultimate form of a housing shortage.”39 Unsurprisingly, most of Toronto’s civic leaders viewed Old Chinatown as an “eyesore.” In December 1946 the electorate voted in favour of acquisition of land to be expropriated and demolished to build a new Civic Square, and to build the New City Hall after years of debate.40 A total vote of 27 671 voted in favour of acquiring the area bounded by Bay Street, Chestnut Street, Queen Street, and a line approximately 460 feet north of Albert Street, with an assessed value of $2 000 000.00, with a majority of 8910 votes.41 The city council at its meeting on February 17, 1947 “by bylaw no. 168935 expropriated the lands in connection with the civic square.”42 Demolition began on April 2, 1955, and by 1958 over 500 people had been dispossessed.43 The Civic Government’s dreams of a modern city hall were realized upon razed ground previously home to dispossessed immigrants and their businesses. Comparing the public and popular discourse surrounding the demolition of Chinatown from 1949-1955 to the discourse around the Ward seemingly is characterized by striking differences; while the explicit racist and condemnatory fervor disappeared, it was supplanted by “positive” racial generalizations informed by the same process of othering. The Chinese community is described as “law-abiding, quiet-mannered, honest, and industrious… as restaurant operators they enjoy justifiable popularity;”44

as “inoffensive,”45 as “being a spot of colour on Toronto’s drab landscape” and “quiet, peaceful, law abiding.”46 The tone is a stark contrast to the articles decrying the “yellow peril” from thirty years prior, but still features racial generalizations nonetheless informed by “Occidental” paternalism. Moreover, the lament over the loss of Chinatown as expressed in popular discourse was less concern for the Chinese population—although definitely present—than for the loss of Chinese restaurants. This is perhaps the most important feature of the articles: the positive characterizations of the Chinese community were primarily based in the idea that the Chinese restaurants were bringing Oriental flavour to the predominantly Occidental Toronto. Mary Juke’s 1955 review of the Lichee Garden’s restaurant, “Flavour of Chinese Food Intrigues Occidental Palates,” is perhaps the most lucid illustration of the relationship between the Chinese community with the “Occidental” majority: she refers to “unusual concoctions,” and a striking cleanliness, “because most Chinese take cleanliness for granted.”47 Even in a positive review, it is explicitly clear that the value of the Chinese population to the “host” community—literally, the “Orient” and the “Occident”—lies within the former’s bringing of benign spice, wrapped up in a paternalistic reassertion of fundamental racial otherness. A second Globe article echoing this lament, “With Regret: Progress Removing Loved Café,” by Bruce West, introduces an equally fundamental issue. It begins: “None of us want to stand in the way of progress.” After meandering through a nostalgic remembrance, West concludes morosely but resignedly, “but the old must go to make room for the new.” Despite this, he also refers with self-professed nostalgia for the “cluttered streets” and the “picturesque old spots…rapidly being replaced with fancy modern establishments.” He concludes the article by expressing hope that “we don’t discard [the old] with too much callous impatience in our efforts to erect a bigger and better city.”48 What West’s article highlights is the transmutation of “Toronto the Good” into “Toronto the Progressive.” In 1955, instead of the immigrant community located in the Ward functioning as a vile, dirty, poor, and essentially immoral stain standing in contrast to the comparatively moral and Protestant majority of Toronto, the Chinese community was viewed as a simple people lacking in Western sensibilities living in “a slum empire,”49 that stood in the way of the “modern” progress of the Occidental majority. Despite surface differences, they are articulations of the same rejiggered rhetoric: the Chinese community was victim of the unavoidable “otherness” inscribed upon the low-income immigrant groups living in the Ward by the dominant Torontonian majority. In this narrative, Toronto’s hypocritical monikers are constructed through marginalization. A third theme that emerges out of the public discourse—and the most important—is the acute awareness that all of the articles demonstrate about what was happening to the Chinese population. They express lament, concern, and criticism— in particular, Globe journalist Lex Schrag wrote a two-part series in December of 195550 criticizing the expropriation and displacement of the Chinese community. Multiple articles cite the $2 000 000.00 worth of the

land; more than one draws attention to the lack of concern shown in public opinion for the displacement of over 500 members of a community. The indignance over the loss of the aforementioned literal and figurative “spice” was palpable. The Star did a full-page spread with six photographs the day before the demolition began—the paid circulation of the paper was 402 244 copies.51 Clearly, there was no shortage of public discussion and awareness of the process: the details were publically circulated, various journalists weighed in—the zeitgeist of mid-1950s Toronto was seemingly engaged with expropriation and subsequent demolition of Old Chinatown. Why has this event been erased from Toronto’s collective cultural memory? Why has this discriminatory legacy been forgotten, or ignored? Perhaps it is because a racist and xenophobic history of discrimination against low-income immigrant populations would undermine Toronto’s self-definition as an oasis of cultural diversity. The dominant historical narrative of Toronto the Good, the Progressive, and the Multicultural does not question what populations have had to be marginalized, dispossessed, or forgotten for those monikers to become accepted public perception. For a city that touts itself as a “city of neighbourhoods,” which hinges upon a variety of ethnic enclaves, it is unwilling to compromise this public persona with thoughtful inquiry. The erasure of Toronto’s discriminatory history from collective cultural memory is a fundamentally political act: it creates complacency towards and acceptance of the digestible and palatable version of the city, and in doing so makes it easier to ignore the fact that this legacy continues today. One need only look at Cabbagetown, at former “skid row,” and the recent Regent Park developments to see these historical trends continue, largely ignored. It is crucial the next generation of Torontonian historiography is conscious and critical of accepted social and cultural norms, and challenges the dominant narratives that have been created at the expense of marginalized communities. It must follow the example of scholars such as David Harvey, Elise Chenier, Carolyn Strange, and Sean Purdy in their attempts to bring overlooked populations from the margins to the center of focus. It needs to thoughtfully interrogate the fissures in our “multicultural” society, and explore how erasing undesirable historical narratives of the past are naturalizing the political present. It’s time to be conscious, critical citizens.

Bibliography Bruce, Howard A. “Report of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Committee on Housing Conditions in 1934.” University of Toronto: Center for Urban Community Studies, Urban Policy History Archive. Carver, Humphrey. “Chapter Six: the Ultimate Housing Problem,” in Housing for Canadians: A Study of Housing Problems in the Toronto Area, 1948.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948. Chenier, Elise. “Sex, Intimacy, and Desire among Men of Chinese Heritage and Women of Non-Asian Heritage in Toronto, 1910-1950” Urban History Review, Vol. XLII, No. 2 (Spring 2014): 29-43. Chinese Canadian National Council. Race Relations and the Chinese Canadian Community: Some Approaches. Suggestions on Organizing Seminars and Proceedings of Race Relations Seminars Toronto 1983. Toronto, Ontario, March 1985. Freeman, Victoria. “Toronto Has No History!” Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City” Urban History Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 (Spring 2010): 21-35. Harvey, David. “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, 53, Sept-October 2008, 23-40. Jukes, Mary. “Flavour of Chinese Food Intrigues Occidental Palates,” The Globe and Mail, June 23, 1955. Lemon, James. Toronto Since 1918: An Illustrated History. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1985. Lemon, J. and J. Simmons. A Guide to Data on Nineteenth Century Toronto. Department of Geography, University of Toronto. 1971, revised with additions 1977. Levine, Allan. Toronto, A Biography of a City. British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre, 2013. Massey, Doreen. “Places and Their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal, 39, 1995, 182-192. Maynard, Steven. “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890-1930” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.2 (1994)

Nipp, Dora. “The Chinese in Toronto,” in Gathering Places, Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, 1834-1945, ed. Robert, F. Harney. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1985. Purdy, Sean. “‘It was tough on everybody’: Low-Income Families and Housing Hardship in Post-World War II Toronto” Journal of Social History, 37.2 (2003): 457-482. “Report of the City Council’s Survey Committee on Housing Conditions in Toronto 1942-1943.” Toronto, Ontario. City Council. Survey Committee on Housing Conditions. Reynolds, A. J. “Chinese Inoffensive,” The Globe and Mail, March 4, 1949 Schrag, Lex. “The Civic Square: Metropolitan Toronto,” The Globe and Mail, December 20, 1955. Shrag, Lex. “Post Mortem: Metropolitan Toronto,” The Globe and Mail, December 7, 1955. Speisman, Stephen. “St. John’s Shetl: the Ward in 1911,” in Gathering Places, Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, 1834-1945, ed. Robert, F. Harney. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1985. Strange, Carolyn. Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1995. A Synopsis of The City Hall and Square Competition for Toronto, Canada. Mayor’s Office, Toronto. September, 1959. Thompson, Richard H. Toronto’s Chinatown: the Changing Social Organization of an Ethnic Community. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Toronto City Council Minutes, 1946, Vol. 1, Appendix, “A.” Toronto City Council Minutes, 1942, Vol. 2, Appendix “C.” Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Weaver, John C. “The Modern City Realized: Toronto Civic Affairs 1880-1915,” in The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City, ed. Alan F. Artibise and Gilbert A. Stelter. Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1979.

West, Bruce. “Nostalgia: New Things Play Havoc With Past,” The Globe and Mail, July 16, 1954. West, Bruce. “With Regret: Progress Removing Loved Café,” The Globe and Mail, January 6, 1955.

Primary Sources “Chinatown Gloomy as Wreckers Move In,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 1955. “Chinatown Hoping to Save One Third,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday April 1, 1955. “Chinese Mayor Chooses,” The Globe and Mail, December 4, 1954. “Chinese Need a Friendly Hand,” The Globe and Mail, April 5, 1955. “Chinatown that Was,” The Globe and Mail, July 7, 1955. “Extends Time for Chinatown House Clearance,” The Globe and Mail, August 19, 1954. “Half Colourful Area Disappears,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 1955. “Quaint Chinese Shops and Restaurants Hang ‘Closed’ Signs on Their Doors, As Council Clears Area for a Civic Square,” Toronto Daily Star, April 1, 1955. “Says Toronto Chinese Forgotten Minority,” The Globe and Mail, February 21, 1949. “What Becomes of Chinatown?” The Globe and Mail, February 22, 1955. “What is the Ward going to do with Toronto,” The Public Health Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (February, 1919) pp. 56-61. “Will Fight to Last Ditch to Save Their Chinatown,” The Toronto Daily Star, February 28, 1955.

Endnotes Victoria Freeman, “Toronto Has No History!” Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City” Urban History Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 (Spring 2010): 21-35. 13 1

Allan Levine, Toronto: A Biography of a City (British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre, 2013), 211. 3 Doreen Massey, “Places and Their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal, 39, 1995. 182-192. See also Sean Purdy, “‘It was tough on everybody’: Low-Income Families and Housing Hardship in Post-World War II Toronto” Journal of Social History, 37.2, 2003: 457-482. 4 Stephen Speisman, “St. John’s Shtetl: the Ward in 1911,” Gathering Place: Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, ed. Robert F Harney (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1885), 107. 5 J. Lemon and J. Simmons, A Guide to Data on Nineteenth Century Toronto (Department of Geography, University of Toronto, 1971), 51. 6 John C. Weaver, “The Modern City Realized, Toronto Civic Affairs 18801915,” The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City, ed. Alan F. Artibise and Gilbert A. Stelter (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1979), 43. 7 Speisman, St John’s Shtetl, 107. See also Steven Maynard ,“Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890-1930” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.2, 1994, 212. 8 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 120. 9 Ibid. See also Speisman, St John’s Shtetl, 108-109 10 Levine Toronto: A Biography, 122. 11 Weaver, “The Modern City,” 43-44. 12 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 123. 13 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 132. 14 Speisman, St John’s Shtetl, 110-111. See also Weaver “The Modern City,” 44, 49. 15 Weaver, “The Modern City,” 43. See also Valverde, The Age of light, Soap, and Water, 134. 16 Levine Toronto: A Biography, 124. 17 Weaver “The Modern City,” ibid. 18 Weaver “The Modern City,” 49. 19 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 126, 123 20 Weaver, “The Modern City,” 43. 21 Speisman St John’s Shtetl, 111. 22 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 124. 23 Speisman, St John’s Shtetl, 117. See also Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 126. 24 Toronto City Directory, 1878 (Might and Taylor, eBook. Public Domain) 498. 25 Richard H. Thompson Toronto’s Chinatown: the Changing Social Organization of an Ethnic Community (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 39. 26 Dora Nipp “The Chinese in Toronto,” in Gathering Places, Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, 1834-1945, ed. Robert, F. Harney (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1985), 150. 2

Thompson, Toronto’s Chinatown, 40. Nipp, “The Chinese in Toronto,” 150, 163. 29 Thompson, Toronto’s Chinatown, 43. 30 Nipp, “The Chinese in Toronto,” 151. See also Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 134. 31 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, ibid. 32 Elise Chenier, “Sex, Intimacy, and Desire among Men of Chinese Heritage and Women of Non-Asian Heritage in Toronto, 1910-1950” Urban History Review, Vol. XLII, No. 2, Spring 2014, 31. 33 Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1995), 155. See also Levine Toronto: A Biography, 135. 34 Nipp, “The Chinese in Toronto,” 159. See also Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 134-135. 35 Nipp, “The Chinese in Toronto,” 159. 36 Thompson, Toronto’s Chinatown, 43, 92. 37 Howard A. Bruce, “Report of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Committee on Housing Conditions in 1934.” University of Toronto: Center for Urban Community Studies, Urban Policy History Archive, 4. 38 “Report of the City Council’s Survey Committee on Housing Conditions in Toronto 1942-1943.” Toronto, Ontario. City Council. Survey Committee on Housing Conditions, 8. 39 Humphrey Carver, “Chapter Six: the Ultimate Housing Problem,” in Housing for Canadians: A Study of Housing Problems in the Toronto Area, 1948.” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 2. 40 Levine, Toronto: A Biography, 211. “A Synopsis of The City Hall and Square Competition for Toronto, Canada.” Mayor’s Office, Toronto. September, 1959, 1. 41 Toronto City Council Minutes, 1947, “Appendix C,” 91,115. 42 Toronto City Council Minutes, 1946, “Appendix A, Report no. 21,” 1195. 43 “Chinatown is Gloomy as Wreckers Move In,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 1955. See also Levine, Toronto: A Biography, ibid. 44 “Chinese Need a Friendly Hand,” The Globe and Mail, April 5, 1955. 45 A.J. Reynolds, “Chinese Inoffensive,” The Globe and Mail, Mar. 4, 1949. 46 “Half Colourful Area Disappears,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 1955. 47 Mary Jukes, “Flavour of Chinese Food Intrigues Occidental Palates,” The Globe and Mail, June 23 1955. 48 Bruce West, “With Regret: Progress Removing Loved Café,” The Globe and Mail, January 6, 1955. 49 Lex Schrag, “The Civic Square: Metropolitan Toronto,” The Globe and Mail, December 20, 1955. 50 Lex Schrag, “Post Mortem: Metropolitan Toronto,” The Globe and Mail, December 7, 1955. 51 “Quaint Chinese Shops and Restaurants Hang ‘Closed’ Signs on Their Doors as Council Clears Area for A Civic Square,” The Toronto Daily Star, April 1, 1955. 27 28

Women in the Baltic States By Sohee Chin The history of the Baltic States, often represented as a coherent sociopolitical entity by scholars, embodies three distinct countries— Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—amalgamated by topography but segmented by different languages, mentalities, and political orientations. Drawing cases from the three states, this paper explores how the construction of femininity and the changes in gender ideologies from the nineteenth to the twentieth century impacted the lives of women in the Baltic States. Through a chronological narrative of three key time periods in modern Baltic history— the 1860s national movements and period of independence in 1918-1940; incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940; and post-Soviet transition in the late twentieth century—this paper argues that the political changes under the socialist regime of the Soviet Union in the 1940s perpetuated the oppression of Baltic women. The latter part of this essay will examine the stagnation of feminism in the Baltic States’ democratic transition in the twentieth century due to the lasting effects of the socialist discourse. Before delving into the subject, it is important to note that research devoted to the study of women in the Baltic States provides very few sources accessible in English. While research on post-Soviet countries on the international level generally focused on either Russia or central Europe, local studies undermined gender as a variable for analysis. Consequently, although the sources used in this paper do not systematically cover the entire history of Baltic women, an effort has been made to draw on materials from diverse scholarly publications. Befitting of the early time period, the patriarchal order of gender that characterized the Baltic States often intersected with variables of class, ethnicity and religion. In the rural peasant communities of Lithuania for instance, local women, more often peasants than members of an urban artisan class, worked together with men to help maintain their family farms, while the privileged gentries like the Baltic-German, Polish, or Lithuanian aristocratic women stayed home, segregated by a strict division of gender spheres. In this case, gender, class and ethnic divisions transected. Regressive to feminism, it is interesting to see that the public-private split of gender roles practiced among the upper class elite was an indication of status and was an ideal living arrangement that the peasantry hoped to achieve, despite the latter’s more flexible and liberating position compared to the former.1 The central religion of a society also varied women’s experiences on the macro level.2 All three Baltic States Christianized between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, Estonia and Latvia became Evangelic Lutherans in the sixteenth century whereas Roman Catholicism continued to be the dominant religion in Lithuania. Although literacy became gradually prevalent among Baltic women, Estonian

women and peasants had a comparatively high literacy rate due to the dominant religion of Lutheranism.3 Thus, although all women were subordinate to men, the interplay between class, ethnicity and religion significantly changed the lives of women for better or for worse. This patriarchal ideology therefore constructed the idealized feminine identity as belonging to the private realm of the home away from the activities of public life. Despite the widespread patriarchal culture, all three Baltic States expressed feminist sentiments in the nineteenth century. Spurred by the national awakening, the national movements of the Baltic States beginning in the 1860s sparked cultural romanticism of women as the “nations’ aspirations.”4 The movements’ bestowed women with the role of upholding the nations’ spirit and assuring its rejuvenation. Women’s physical involvement in this movement can be seen in the first Latvian song festival organized in 1873 where women were alongside the men participating. A notable figure in this period was Karoline Kronvalde (1836-1913). Through a published letter in 1870, Kronvalde fought for women’s rights to education and individual liberation, and was the first to make the differentiation between the rights of women and the rights of the nation. A magazine from 1887 similarly published discussions of women’s entitlements by the first Estonian feminist, Lilli Suburg (1841-1923). Founded in 1905, the Union of Lithuanian Women for the Protection of Women’s Rights was Lithuania’s first women’s organization. Although national emancipation was the group’s main goal, the members also demanded the same rights for women.5 Moreover, the Catholic Church in Lithuania joined the momentum of the national movement and got involved in the women’s rights discourse. In fact, Catholic priests P. Dogelis and P. Janusevicius, with approximately 1000 partakers, initiated the first women’s congress in Kaunas in 1907.6 The paralleled sentiments of early feminism were seen throughout the Baltic countries, which significantly advanced the social participation of women. The efforts to put the earlier feminist sentiments into legislation occurred during the Baltic countries’ period of independence between 19181940. Both men and women in all three Baltic countries were granted equal political rights through the national constitutions of 1920-1922.7 Although women’s political participation was low, some notable women were in high enough social statures to hold significant power and voice their support for the legislation of women’s rights.8 Such persons included Berta Pipna, who was the first female elected into the Latvian assembly in 1931. As well, six women were elected to the Lithuanian Seimas or St. Petersburg parliament.9 Aside from the guarantees of gender equality in the constitutions of all three Baltic States, Lithuania was the only country that also granted equal inheritance and ownership rights for women. Already notable for their remarkable advanced laws—first Statue of Lithuania, approved as early as 1529 with later editions in effect for approximately 300 years—Lithuania granted female-gentries the right to own and inherit property, to attend public conferences, divorce, child custody, and protection from sexual violence.10 Thus, women’s roles in public life thrived before the Soviet occupation in 1940. Although Estonians too made efforts to

liberate women from the responsibility of their husbands, it was not successful. Despite the fact that women’s role as “mothers of the nation” was regressive, in that women were not seen as independent political entities during the time of both the national movements and the period of independence, it is clear that gender and women stood alongside the national debate. Women’s agency loosened in the public sphere, despite the previously dominant identity of women as domestic.11 Compared to other European countries at the time, the early feminist voice in the Baltic States, Lithuania in particular, reflected progressive efforts towards achieving women’s activism.12 The loss of independence by the Baltic States was marked by the threat of World War II. By signing the Pacts of Defense and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in September-October 1939, the Baltic countries were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. Under the Soviet rule in 1940 and their restored power in 1944, the new socialist government drastically changed the gender dimensions of the Baltic States.13 This was evident in the case of Lithuania, where a woman’s role was redefined by the state’s need for a larger labour pool. The Soviet infrastructure undeniably supported women’s full participation in the labour force alongside men through propaganda, the welfare benefits of state sponsored child-care services, three-year maternity leaves, secure abortion rights, and political representation of women, despite limited entry into powerful positions. However although Baltic women may have appeared completely liberated by some western feminists from the outset, this was definitely not the case. The rationale behind this Soviet system was not to offer women rights for their security, but it was solely based on economic reasons—for “communist economic development.”14 As one historian put it, “women were freed from the guardianship of men to become the wards of state.”15 This “equality” in the context of a socialist state was often constraining and arduous for women as the substantial shortages in the labor field confronted women with the double or often triple burden of full-time production work, household work, and childcare.16 Thus the state-authorized equality was perceived as more of a strain than freedom. Therefore, the feminine image of the working mothers— both in the realms of the home and society’s productive workforce— implemented in the Soviet territories did not offset the inequalities but further aggravated them. Although the Soviet state may have enabled, or in more appropriate terms, forced women to become productive members of society, it is important to note that the Communist government repudiated or disregarded gender inequality within the public and private sphere of paid and unpaid work respectively. Thus, one historian claims that the idea of “communist equality” needs to be rejected. In fact, many Lithuanian women supported this idea and saw the rejection as liberating.17 It is essential to understand that the conceptions of equality, equity, and emancipation had different meanings in the communist discourse of the Soviet Union. Thus the term equality used in the Baltic States under the Soviets cannot be paralleled with the definition of equality in democratic countries like the United States. Choice is the main differentiation

between the two concepts of equality. While Baltic women were previously able to make the choice to stay home or speak up against the inequality and fight for women’s rights, and later achieve a position with political power, under the Soviet system Baltic women had no such choice. One historian questioned which of the two women—the one who works in the public sphere or the one who works privately in the home—is more liberated. Having the right, the choice to stay home or work is true liberation. Under the Soviet regime however, work was not a right but a state-mandated obligation.18 Therefore the women of the Baltic States, under the rule of the Soviet Union, were oppressed by the systems of both domestic patriarchy and the gender-prejudiced workforce. Rather than seeing the simple increase in the rate of women’s employment and political activity as a privilege and liberation for women, the Lithuanian experience—representing the women of Latvia and Estonia as well—unveils that the communist structure failed to end the repression of women and rather intensified the oppression.19 Doubly exploited as producers and reproducers, it is not startling that Lithuanian women did not feel liberated. Working an average of 72 hours a week, approximately 5 hours more than what men performed in a week, these women voiced feelings of exhaustion, which increased exponentially during times of labor shortages.20 Along with the changes to the feminine construction under the Soviets, many Baltic women—approximately 10,000 pastoral Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in which women and children composed of more than half this amount— were faced with deportations to Siberia or forced to migrate during Stalin’s Purges in 1944.21 Consequently, the lives of women in the Baltic States under Soviet rule were a period of national repression, insecurity, and further oppression on women. This had a lasting effect in the Baltic countries’ transition towards democracy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the gender ideologies of the double duty of women as the homemaker and laborer had negative implications for the post-Soviet Baltic States. As one scholar put it, “ideologically, Communism created a space for equality, the current democracy should provide greater personal freedoms.”22 However contrary to expectations, the position of Baltic women since the communist collapse has seen little progress. In fact, the Baltic countries continue to lag behind considerably compared to places like Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries that have wide support for gender equality. The stagnation of feminism in the Baltic States reflects the Soviet legacy of women being seen as subordinate to the production and reproduction of the state. Some scholars claim that the early post-Soviet Baltic State was similar to the national awakening period where women’s participation in the public life did not elicit greater equality. The regained independence of all the three Baltic countries coincided with the early 1990s revival of romanticized gender ideologies of femininity, which stigmatized women as a mother for the nation’s reproduction and as a marginalized minority.23 In Lithuania, the return to the redomestication of

women also reflected the state’s effort to increase the low fertility rates of the twentieth century. Women were “emancipated” only for consumerism and family life. This nationalistic discourse on motherhood clashed with the social reality of the need for a two-income family, placing women in a double bind between the demands of employed work and motherhood.24 Especially with the significant decrease of childcare facilities throughout the Baltic States since the fall of the Soviet Union, women experienced the burden significantly.25 Although women now have the choice to stay home and/or do paid work, the economic transformation challenged women with more added problems on top of the remnants of the Soviet legacy. In the post-Soviet period, Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian women held higher education degrees than men and yet, the wage discrepancies between men and women have increased.26 The Soviets’ stigmatized ideology of women as being responsible for both paid and unpaid labor placed women in minor positions, preventing women from getting promotions and reaching higher, more profitable positions.27 Economic discrimination also took greater proportions at times of economic insecurity, in which women were the first to face unemployment.28 This often resulted in a whole new set of problems for women and society. This included the rise of beggars, prostitution, trafficking, and the “commodification of femininity.”29 The feminization of poverty also often intersected with age, class and ethnicity, and thus victimized aged female minorities who have endured the fall of Soviet businesses. The rise of new social problems along with the discrimination of women in the workforce through gender wage gaps, the glass ceiling effect, and unemployment, further oppressed Baltic women in an alienating system distinct from that of the previous socialist regime. Despite the pervasive gender inequality, the lack of feminist movements in the post-socialist Baltic States is notable. Although Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania all approved the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in the late twentieth century, the lives of women saw no improvement. Even though the three Baltic countries affirmed the equality of all people in the 1990s through the constitution, it was not until very recently that they passed laws specifically pertaining to gender equality. Lithuania adopted the Law on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men in 1998; Estonia accepted the Gender Equality Act in 2004; and Latvia guaranteed the equality through the passing of other legislations. Equality discussions having been condemned by the Soviet Union during their annexation of the Baltic States, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, tend to similarly overlook and disregard the need for gender-inclusive policies. As one scholar put it, “feminism continues to be demonized in the [Baltic States] region in an ironical ‘frontlash’ where anti-feminist discourse precedes a feminist one.”30 Lithuanian feminists admit themselves that the “post-Communist feminism is in its infancy” compared to the feminist movements in the West. Thus, women who have experienced the Communist regime find themselves indifferent and unable to relate to the privileged feminism of the West.31 Although very few

women were elected into prominent positions in Baltic political parties, some held significant power in the twentieth century. A female Prime Minister, Kazimira Prunskienė, headed Lithuania’s first government from 1990-1991 after the declaration of independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Female politicians also began to occupy numerous posts in the Latvian government since 1994, and in 1999, Vaira Vike Freiberga was elected president. While women are undeniably educated and are active participants in public life, Baltic societies remain significantly gender-biased and anti-feminist.32 To protect the exploitation of women’s double role as reproducers and producers, rights and policies pertaining to gender equality have to move to the front of the political agenda. The chronological narrative of key periods in modern Baltic history illuminated how the lives of women changed according to the political transformations of the Baltic States. In the period of national movements and independence, women’s lives were characterized by the effects of early feminist sentiments and public challenges for greater rights. Despite the greater space of equality under the rule of the Soviet Union, in legal terms, the equality rights of women did not translate into equality but rather placed women in a double bind between the state-mandated burden of housework, childcare, and production work. Although communism guaranteed the liberation of women through improved prospects in education, employment, and political significance, it ultimately failed due to its disregard to eradicate patriarchy. However, despite the collapse of the socialist system, democracy did not elicit progressive change in the post-Soviet Baltic States. Feminism festered and the new government adopted the communist legacy of ignoring women’s inequality in the private and public realms. Placing women’s question in the backseat to economic and political stability, anti-feminist sentiments emerged alongside new social problems that victimized women. By looking at the lives of women from each of these three periods, it is clear that gender inequality was pervasive throughout modern Baltic history.

Bibliography Connor, Kevin. The History of the Baltic States. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003. Irina, Novikova. “Women in Latvia Today: Changes and Experiences.” Canadian Woman Studies 16, no. 1 (1995): 27-31. Ishkanian, Armine. “VI. Gendered Transitions: The Impact of the Post-Soviet Transition on Women in Central Asia and the Caucasus.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 2, no. 3-4 (2003): 475-496. Kivimäe, Jüri. "The Baltic States 1940-1941: Occupation, Annexation, 'Socialist Revolution'?" Lecture, Modern Baltic History from University of Toronto, Toronto, February 26, 2014. LaFont, Suzanne. Women in Transition: Voices from Lithuania. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Smith, Bonnie G. "Baltic States." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. England: Oxford University Press, 2008. 196-200. Thorborg, Marina. "Women and Gender in History in the Baltic Region." In The Baltic Sea Region: Cultures, Politics, Societies, edited by Witold Maciejewski, 529-584. Uppsala: Baltic University Press, 2002.

Endnotes Bonnie G. Smith, “Baltic States,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History (England: Oxford University Press, 2008), 197. 2 Armine Ishkanian, “VI. Gendered Transitions: The Impact of the Post-Soviet Transition on Women in Central Asia and the Caucasus,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 2, no. 3-4 (2003): 476. 3 Smith, “Baltic States,” 196. 4 Smith, “Baltic States,” 197. 5 Ibid. 6 Marina Thorborg, “Women and Gender in History in the Baltic Region,” in The Baltic Sea Region: Cultures, Politics, Societies, ed. Witold Maciejewski, (Uppsala: Baltic University Press, 2002), 532. 7 Smith, “Baltic States,”, 198.Irina Novikova, “Women in Latvia Today: Changes and Experiences,” Canadian Woman Studies 16, no. 1 (1995): 27. 8 Smith, “Baltic States,” 198. See also Irina Novikova, “Women in Latvia Today: Changes and Experiences,” Canadian Woman Studies 16, no. 1 (1995): 27. 9 Suzanne LaFont, Women in Transition: Voices from Lithuania (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 11. 1

Thorborg, “Women and Gender in History in the Baltic Region,” 531-532. Smith, “Baltic States,” 198. 12 LaFont, Women in Transition, 11. 13 Jüri Kivimäe, “The Baltic States 1940-1941: Occupation, Annexation, ‘Socialist Revolution’?” (lecture, Modern Baltic History from University of Toronto, Toronto, February 26, 2014). 14 LaFont, Women in Transition, 4. 15 Smith, “Baltic States,” 198. 16 Kevin Connor, The History of the Baltic States (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003), 185. 17 LaFont, Women in Transition, 13. 18 Ibid, 14. 19 Ibid, 5. 20 LaFont, Women in Transition, 4. 21 Connor, The History of the Baltic States, 126. 22 LaFont, Women in Transition, 18. 23 Smith, “Baltic States,” 198. 24 Ibid. 25 Connor, The History of the Baltic States, 185. 26 Connor, The History of the Baltic States, 185. 27 LaFont, Women in Transition, 7. 28 Connor, The History of the Baltic States, 185. 29 Smith, “Baltic States,” 199. 30 LaFont, Women in Transition, 15. 31 Ibid. 32 Connor, The History, 187. 10 11

The Blended Iconography of Early Modern Spanish American Art By Jennifer Berg The religious iconography within early modern Spanish American art provides consummate material to consider the religious and cultural syncretism of the period.1 Catholicism was not neatly brought from Europe to the Americas but European Catholicism collided with Indigenous beliefs, causing a Spanish American syncretic response. Early modern Spanish American iconography does not tell the story of inculturation, but reveals an act of recreation, indicating a new religious understanding.2 As European Catholicism was synthesized with pre-Hispanic religious ideology, Spanish American Catholicism was created. Through an engagement with the iconographies of Santiago, ángeles arcabuceros, the marriage of Martín de Loyola and, Our Lady of Guadalupe, this essay will stress the emergence of a new religious syncretism, one which provides the foundation for religious understanding and identification. In his study of Santiago’s Horse, historian William B. Taylor engages in a similar focus by marking the transformation of Santiago as the symbol for Spanish Christian conquest, one which turned him into a patron saint, and icon; Santiago’s original meaning upon arriving to the Americas reveals, “[Santiago] represented [the Spaniards’] destiny to rule and the Indians’ destiny to submit. He was eagerly promoted by Spanish evangelizers as a personification of Christian conquest and widely accepted by indians [sic] as a force to be propitiated and invoked.”3 Taylor highlights Santiago’s journey from Spanish to Indigenous, showing the many-faceted perspectives from which the figure garnered devotion. The Santiago figure underwent several recreations throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, each recreation reforming the meaning of Santiago as a saint and symbol. Taylor notes the nature of the natives’ first contact with Santiago: [i]mages of Santiago and human impersonators of the saint were important props in the dramas of mock combat that Spaniards staged for themselves in America and promoted among Indian neophytes…. Indians reenacted the Reconquista, with Santiago leading the Christians into glorious victory over the infidel. The parallel with the Spanish conquest of Indian America would not have been lost on the native spectators and participants.4 Taylor suggests that these early dramas and festivals were enacted by Spanish officials in order to attain both political and religious control,“[t]hrough Santiago as fierce patron of the Spaniards, the memory of violent conquest remained alive, and villagers might welcome the sting of his sword at fiesta

time as penance for their sins.”5 Missionary accounts that imply that natives could participate not only in the wrath of or submission to Santiago, but also in his protection, reveal the beginning of Santiago’s first transformation. Santiago became a dually important yet ambiguous symbol among colonial pueblos; representations of Santiago featured the figure in “dressing armour and mounted on a white horse with his sword raised to strike the infidels arrayed at the horse’s feet,” and were kept and treasured by villagers throughout Spanish America.6 Taylor suggests that the Indigenous neophyte attraction to Santiago was partly due to his horse, with many traditional folktale accounts of the Mexican conquest involving Santiago’s horse having wounded and killed as many enemies with his mouth as Santiago himself did with his sword.7 This first transformation, or recreation, of Santiago gave way to others as the symbolism of Santiago became available for meaning not only for Spanish Christians but for newly converted natives who brought their own history and old faith to the present and new. Not only did the Indigenous peoples appropriate Santiago to tell their own history, but stories of Santiago’s aid to Christians in battle were rewritten to engage with Indigenous peoples. Santiago also became a type of sanctioned god, one that could cultivate and fertilize the land.8 In his second recreation, Santiago became a champion and saint for natives, who inserted him into their historical tradition and tasked him with looking after their needs. Santiago was indeed reinvented a third time, becoming an even more pagan image, “in the eighteenth century … attention increasingly was drawn to the horse, as if the animal had become the saint.”9 Taylor attributes this last recreation of the Spaniards’ Santiago to “[Santiago’s] various meanings were rooted not only in the official Spanish messages about conquest and conversion but also in native understandings of animals and the sacred and in adjustments to colonial rule at the local level.”10 The Spanish image of a triumphal figure on a horse was reborn into a pagan figure where the horse attracted more attention and awe than its rider because of differing ideologies surrounding the imagery of the figure. Taylor chooses to call the changing meanings of Santiago departures. For my study, I will consider these departures, as syncretic recreations signalling new meaning. In his article “Images for a New World,” Thomas Cummins discusses a similar phenomenon of imagery evolution, but with a different example, that of the “iconographic tradition of ángeles arcabuceros [angels bearing guns],”11 calling images of this genre a creative act of expression, or a reimagining.12 Cummins’ article features two images placed side-by-side: the first from a 1607 military manual, the second is the circa-eighteenth century image, Angelic Harquebusier.13 It is clear from the opposition of the two images that the former inspired the latter. The angel’s musket and other equipment are exact mimics of the manual’s image, while the clothing and extravagant headdress make the angel seem more royal than martial. The militarization of the angel is blatant, as is the evidence of mixing of ideology; the angel retains his supernatural essence in his elevated dress and gentle stance, yet

resembles the soldier to indicate the angel’s role to do combat and protect. Fernando Cervantes’ study is a helpful description of how friars worked to first introduce angels to the Indigenous religious milieu: “the friars intended to give their neophytes a vivid and realistic visual imagery of the closeness of the supernatural. Angels, of course, were especially good conduits for such purposes.”14 Cervantes’ detailed account of mendicant friars’ uses for angel iconography recounts the various ways angel iconography was used to teach the Indigenous neophytes the ways of Christianity. According to Cervantes, angels were intentionally introduced in the conversion of Indigenous peoples as figures of both warning and aid.15 Caterina Pizzigoni corroborates Cervantes’ notion, asserting in her article that for the Indigenous converts, angels came to inhabit the same consideration and devotion as the saints, leading to the notion of guardian angels.16 Pizzigoni continues her claim, suggesting that, “rather than being ethereal figures set apart from other celestial categories, [angels] ended up populating the realm of saints, blending into it and eventually losing any distinguishable trait.”17 Cervantes and Pizzigoni each posit an argument similar to that of Cummins’ re-imagining on the part of the native consideration of the role of angels.Building upon what Cummins, Cervantes, and Pizzigoni each suggest, I further posit that these images build upon Pizzigoni’s notion that the doctrine of angels, in becoming blended with the cult of the saints from which emerged the consideration of the guardian angel, the ángeles arcabuceros are a recreation of protective angels that both warns and aids, as Cervantes suggests the friars instructed The ángeles arcabuceros are therefore syncretic in their combination of friar-instructed angel doctrine with Indigenous interiorization of angelic guardianship. As Cummins’ poses, the ángeles arcabuceros present, “an imaginative world so organized as to form a community of shared beliefs and identities.”18 Cummins is gesturing to the willful act of creating something new out of two realities; the ángeles arcabuceros are not just appropriated angels, but are emblematic of syncretic recreation on the part of the Indigenous converts, who made the angels to be like the saints in human form and accessibility. The pictographic depiction of the marriage of Martín de Loyola, nephew of Saint Ignatius, to an Incan princess expresses differently the notion of recreation than that of Santiago’s Horse or of the Angelic Harquebusier. Here, syncretism is not reflected as a reality but an ideal as the painting communicates a kind of dynastic union between the Catholic Jesuit and Quechua-speaking populations. The image, The Wedding of the Nephew of Ignatius, Martín de Loyola to the Ñusta, an Incan Princess ca. 1718,19 shows the bride and groom, as well as several black-clad Jesuits and what appears to be Incans in ceremonial dress; both parties look on approvingly. Ramón Gutiérrez and Graciela María Viñuales explain that, “[t]he Jesuits conceived of art as a means of transmitting their message and their values, as functional with respect to their various goals…. The Jesuits were especially keen on promoting religious devotion by means of images and imagination.”20 The image of the wedding between the two prominent figures of opposing sides would have

been influential in promoting a socio-political message of a united CatholicQuechua-speaking reality. Of the Jesuits’ evangelizing work, Gutiérrez and Viñuales claim that the Jesuits formed a “Creole consciousness, a national spirit,”21 which is arguably in nascent stages here in the marriage painting; reasonably, any offspring of Loyola’s nephew and of the Inca princess would be mestizo, that is a person of mixed Indigenous and European parentage. In the sense that the image is seeking to create a new reality, it is somewhat different than Santiago’s Horse or the Angelic Harquebusier, which reflect changing religious attitudes instead of promoting a new religious ideal, as the marriage painting does. Despite its perspective toward a non-existent reality, the painting stands with the examples of Santiago’s Horse and the Angelic Harquebusier as syncretic in that the marriage painting works to promote ideals that are a blending of both Spanish Catholic and Indigenous. Arguably, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is the most potent example of early native creations bearing Spanish Catholic religious meaning. Jeanette Peterson offers a detailed description of the tilma (a kind of cloak worn by native Mexicans) image; the “doubly framed” figure wears an aquamarine shawl over a rose tunic, riding on the arc of a blackened crescent moon, while a winged angel holds the corners of the mantle’s hem.22 Peterson claims that the Mexican Guadalupe “bears no physical resemblance to her Spanish counterpart,”23 calling the figure’s “light brown or wheat-coloured” skin and black hair “important ethnic signifiers that … are intentional.”24 Speaking to this intentionality, Francis Johnston highlights the non-Catholic elements of the image as effects to “reinforce the teachings of the Christian missionaries” to the “heathen Aztecs.”25 As the Lady stands in front of the sun, Johnston says that “the Aztecs [would have] realised that she was greater than the dreaded sun-god Huitzilopochtli;” her foot resting on the crescent moon, “signifie[s] their foremost deity… whom she had clearly already vanquished.”26 Her mantle, aquamarine as Peterson describes, is “the colour worn by Aztec royalty…. the stars strewn across the mantle told the Aztecs that she was greater than the stars of heaven, which they worshipped as gods.”27 Peterson’s theory of the intentionally different look of the Lady is matched with Johnston’s careful annunciation of the many elements of the image that would have translated to the native Aztecs specific details pertaining to the identity of the figure. Johnston distinguishes however, that the Lady “could not be God since her hands were joined together in prayer and her head was bowed in reverence… to One greater than her.”28 Also adding that the Lady wears a gold brooch bearing a black cross “at her neck [which] was identical to the one emblazoned on the banners and helmets of the Spanish soldiers, as if telling the Aztecs that her religion was that of their conquerors.”29 Johnston is pointing to the various native symbols that help to identify this image as uniquely Mexican and syncretic. It is syncretic in that it works to combine elements of monotheistic Catholicism and as well as Aztec paganism. Distinguishing Our Lady of Guadalupe as not only syncretic but also a recreation is rooted in the intentionality that Peterson and Johnston each insist; Our Lady of Guadalupe

was created not (only) for devotion, but also for evangelizing purposes, to in effect speak to the Aztecs in a way that they would be more inclined to understand, that is, along the lines of their own religion. Recreation in this sense is at work to commemorate and promote devotion in creating a new religious understanding of the Virgin for an Aztec audience. These examples of Spanish American iconography present an argument for Spanish American iconography not as a symbol of inculturation, but as recreations of culture, where the blending of cultures is synthesized in religious iconographic representations in order to present new ideals specific to Spanish American peoples. Each work presents an aspect of blending Catholic ideology with native interpretations, but more than mere interpretations; syncretism in these examples is not only the combining of two religious cultures, but is exemplary of creating a new version of Catholicism for Spanish America. As in the cases of Santiago’s Horse, Angelic Harquebusier, and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the symbols native to pre-Hispanic America are employed in ways not anticipated by Spain, but were used by native cultures in order to communicate a Christianity of their own. In the example of the Jesuit painting of the marriage between Loyola’s nephew and the Inca Ñusta, it too seeks to create Catholicism for Spanish America in presenting an ideal for approving coexistence and union of Catholicism with the descendants of the Inca Empire through a socio-political marriage. In effect, Spanish American iconography does not signify inculturation, but instead cultural reinterpretations and recreations. These examples of Spanish American iconography show not only conversion or efforts to convert, but native conversations about Catholicism as it pertains to Spanish America.

Bibliography Cervantes, Fernando. “Angels conquering and conquered: changing perceptions in Spanish America.” In Angels in the Early Modern World, edited by Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, 104-33. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cummins, Thomas. “Images for a New World.” In The Virgin, Saints, and Angels: South American Paintings 1600-1825 from the Thoma Collection, edited by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, 13-17. Milan: Skira editore S.p.A., 2006. Gutiérrez, Ramón and Graciela María Viñuales. “The Artistic and Architectural Legacy of the Jesuits in Spanish America.” In The Jesuits and The Arts 1540-1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, S.J. and Gauvin Alexander Bailey, 271-310. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2005. Johnston, Francis. The Wonder of Guadalupe: The Origin and Cult of the Miraculous Image of the Blessed Virgin in Mexico. Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1981. Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas. Austin: University of Texas, 2014. Pizzigoni, Caterina. “Where did all the angels go? An interpretation of the Nahua supernatural world.” In Angels, Demons and The New World, edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, 126-45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Taylor, William B. “Santiago’s Horse: Christianity and Indian Resistance.” In Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas 1994, edited by William B. Taylor and Frankli Pease G.Y., 151-89. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Endnotes The term “syncretism” will be used throughout this argument to mean the union of diverse tenets or practices, especially in religion; specifically in this paper, “syncretism” will be used in regard to the various points of union between European Catholicism and American Indigenous religions. 2 This essay defines “Inculturation” as the adaptation of the Christian practices in order to accommodate the practices of a non-Christian group, and this argument will posit that the iconographic examples referenced might reveal culture shifts in Indigenous considerations of Christian belief. 3 William B. Taylor, “Santiago’s Horse: Christianity and Indian Resistance,” in Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas 1994, ed by William B. Taylor 1

and Franklin Pease G.Y. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 156. 4 Ibid, 156. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid, 157. 7 Ibid, 158. 8 Ibid, 159. 9 Ibid, 160. 10 Ibid, 161. 11 Thomas Cummins, “Images for a New World,” in The Virgin, Saints, and Angels: South American Paintings 1600-1825 from the Thoma Collection, ed. by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, (Milan: Skira editore S.p.A., 2006), 14. 12 Ibid, 14. 13 Ibid, 15. 14 Fernando Cervantes, ““Angels conquering and conquered: changing perceptions in Spanish America,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. by Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111. 15 Ibid, 120. 16 Caterina Pizzigoni, “Where did all the angels go? An interpretation of the Nahua supernatural world,” in Angels, Demons and The New World, ed. by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 131, 135. 17 Ibid, 145. 18 Cummins, “Images for a New World,” 14. 19 Ramón Gutiérrez and Graciela María Viñuales, “The Artistic and Architectural Legacy of the Jesuits in Spanish America,” in The Jesuits and The Arts 1540-1773, ed. by John W. O’Malley, S.J. and Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2005), 273. 20 Ibid, 297. 21 Ibid, 272. 22 Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas, 2014), 105. 23 Ibid, 105. 24 Ibid, 105. 25 Francis Johnston, The Wonder of Guadalupe: The Origin and Cult of the Miraculous Image of the Blessed Virgin in Mexico (Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1981), 76. 26 Ibid, 76. 27 Ibid, 76. 28 Ibid, 76. 29 Ibid, 77.

Challenging an Androcentric Master Narrative: Re-inscribing the Voices of Jewish Women into Early Modern History By Natasha Richichi-Fried The early modern period in Jewish history, approximately 1492 to 1789, is the birthplace of the Shulchan Aruch, Moses Isserles, David Gans, and Shabbtai Zevi. It is neither possible nor necessary to recount every major historical development during the early modern era, but it is evident simply from these four developments, that some of the most influential people, events, and trends in Jewish history originated in this three-hundred year period. These four developments are also indicative of a larger trend in the writing of Jewish history: an androcentric retelling of events. Through examining the body of work that scholars have produced concerning this period, it becomes clear that there is a master narrative in which the lives, voices, and experiences of women are almost entirely excluded. In this particular paper, the task of the present historian is twofold: first, to identify and explain the silencing of Jewish women; and second, to re-inscribe women’s voices within early modern Jewish history. It is important to note that there is no one “Jewish history”’ or “Jewish tradition” that existed in the early modern period, even in the master narrative. Thus, to avoid fallacious generalizations, this paper will not claim to represent the experiences of all European women Jewry, or even Asheknazim. The methodology will be to provide analysis on a case-by-case basis, dealing with the historical realities of each individual situation, text, and person. Jewish women had limited channels of influence in the early modern period; they were subjugated in every realm that they were allowed to participate in—religious, societal, familial, and economic. This subjugation did not, however, prevent women from actually operating within these realms; it just meant that their experiences were rarely recognized and recorded. The re-inscription of women’s voices into history will provide a significantly more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the life and legacy of Jews during the early modern period. Gendered narratives of history are a relatively recent development in scholarship; it has only been in the last thirty years that scholars have begun to address the roles gender played in early modern Jewish history. It is vital to recognize that the complete absence of women’s voices in the historical narrative is noteworthy in itself. Not only do women make up over half of the population, but women are also the vessel of life, and by extension, only Jewish women can ensure the survival of a Jewish people. The question becomes: why were women omitted from the writing of history? In Men and Women: Gender,

Judaism, and Democracy, Elior suggests that because women were excluded “from public life, this approach has prevented them from taking part in study, culture and creativity, leadership and law, since all of these things require . . . a place in the public domain.”1 While it is partly true that women were denied a leading or equal role in public life/domain, it is also true that Jewish religious, familial, and communal structures in from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries could not function without women. Elior’s comment suggests that women contributed nothing to public life, seemingly because men did not give them permission. However, the understanding that women were completely absent and separate from the public life of Jewish men is based on sources written by and for men. Roseman explains, “When historians wrote about ‘the Jews’ or ‘Jews’ they almost always referred to the men of the group. The man was the primary maker of history, and therefore it’s prime subject. In historiography he was the default choice.”2 It is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if historians only ever consider the “he,” it will always appear as if “she” had no part or place in history. An antidote to Elior can be found in Davidman and Tenenbaum’s “Introduction” to Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, which contains a methodology of historical study that challenges the self-fulfilling prophecy and suggests ways in which women’s existence can be integrated into the scholarship.3 They first explain that feminist scholarship has created a space in which scholars “began to document how male scholars perpetuated women’s invisibility.” This theory is exemplified by the work of the renowned historian Jacob Katz.4 Katz made a significant contribution to Jewish Studies when he decided to include women in his “social history” of Jewish life.5 His methodology was to discern the differences between men’s and women’s roles in Jewish society. Eventually, he arrived at the conclusion that the role of the Jewish woman in Jewish history was facilitative, and each woman existed solely for the purpose of helping a man achieves notable and documentable goals.6 This is the ghetto of the Jewish woman. Katz’s groundbreaking work in the subject of Jewish women’s history is to be both applauded and critiqued. As a supreme master narrative, this one-dimensional characterization of the Jewish woman’s role is tempting. Theoretically, it is logical—Eve was made to be Adam’s helper.7 However, this assumption, gone unchallenged, is what perpetuates women’s invisibility in historical scholarship. Katz’ willingness to include women in his social history of the Jews, but only as “facilitators,” simultaneously gives Jewish women a place within history and imprisons them in this place. It is symptomatic of the scholar’s mistaken acceptance of the theoretical characterization of the “role of the Jewish woman,” as the actual role of all Jewish women. The difference between the singular Jewish woman and the plurality of Jewish women in the early modern period is the subject of an essay by Rosman, titled “The Early Modern European “Jewish Woman.”” He explains: “To collapse an entire category into the singular “woman”

rather than the plural “women” is to move from typology to stereotype. It means creating a normative, prescriptive ideal rather than describing something that existed in reality, positing what characterized (or should have characterized) women rather than analyzing what they did.”8 In stereotyping the “Jewish woman” as “facilitator,” Katz created an inflexible category—a ghetto of sorts—in which historians could place all Jewish women. Due to this pre-existing categorization, individual woman’s experiences were being overlooked and scholars failed to recognize, never mind analyze each woman’s historical reality. Discounting Jewish women’s experiences is not a minor issue in Jewish Studies; it has been written into history in Rabbinic and religious commentaries and perpetuated by central figures like Gershom Scholem. For scholars to move forward in accurately accounting for real women’s experiences, they must first acknowledge and analyze the long-held (mis)conceptions of the “Jewish woman.” Shabbtai Zevi, the false Messiah, married his first wife Sarah in 1664.9 Once married, Sarah became known as Queen Rebecca the Matrona, the Messianic Queen. According to Rapaport-Albert, in Scholem’s analysis of Shabbtai Zevi and Sabbatianism, Scholem “downplayed [Sarah’s] importance” to the entire messianic endeavor.10 Van der Haven, the author of From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh: Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbtai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen, has an even more damning review of Scholem: “Scholem’s refusal to even consider Sarah’s influence on Sabbtai’s reforms in regard to women for his interpretation of the nature of the Sabbatian movement is typical of Scholem’s inclination to emphasize the primacy of ideas—traditionally the exclusive domain of men—rather than persons.”11 This assertion is doubly valuable: first, it informs the reader that there is an alternate narrative to the androcentric one that Scholem produced; second, it explains the reasoning behind this androcentric reading of Sabbatianism. In his work, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, not once is Sarah ever mentioned, even though there is an entire chapter titled “Sabbatianism and Mystical Heresy.” In fact, there is one sentence in the entire text that accounts for women (as a lacuna) in the history of Jewish mysticism, and it is as follows: “Both historically and metaphysically [Jewish mysticism] is a masculine doctrine, made for men and by men.”12 Scholem’s observation is simultaneously accurate and misleading. The Jewish religious tradition is staunchly patriarchal, and therefore, most Jewish religious movements are made for and by men. However, all of these movements have extreme consequences on the lives and roles of women. Rapaport-Albert’s pioneering study titled Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816, reinserts women into the history of Jewish

mysticism, both tallying the influences the movement had on women and that women had on Sabbatianism. According to her research, the sources suggest that women responded “en masse” to the tidings of this false messiah.13 More importantly, an active female following of Shabbtai Zevi was present, and Rapaport-Albert suggests that it was the egalitarian and libertarian messianic theology and doctrine of Shabbtai Zevi that explained this attraction: “It released women from the inherently sensual, corporeal, material nature by which rabbinic tradition had always defined them, and made it possible for them for the first time to be perceived in terms of ‘spirit’ and ‘form,’ terms that would normally apply exclusively to men”14 Unfortunately for the female followers of Shabbtai Zevi, not only did he turn out to be a false messiah, but there is no evidence that he ever delivered on his promises to overhaul the position and status of women in Jewish society. Despite this, the author posits, “we may well suppose that their active involvement with Sabbatianism gave these women a new sense of power and self-worth”15 By examining history through a gendered lens, a new understanding can emerge regarding how women capitalized on historical realities, like mass movements, as a way to rebel against theoretical and religious limitations placed upon them. The theoretical and religious limitations that lead to the creation of a singular ideal of the “Jewish woman” is found most often in commentaries and “how-to” manuals produced by men for women in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The common thread throughout these sources is a focus on piousness. For the Jewish woman though, piousness is not associated with positive mitzvoth, like it is for the Jewish man, since women “were exempted from most of the commandments.”16 Instead, in the early modern period, most of the religious literature written for or about women had the central purpose of preventing the corruption of Jewish men by impure Jewish women. This attitude is found in several primary documents, many of them part of the Yiddish musar literature, Responsa, Many Pious Women and in commentary by figures like Moses Isserles, Solomon Luria, and Benjamin Slonik. Yiddish musar literature is ethical literature, and “in the musar works, women are less individualized: they constitute a kind of cosmic class. The disobedient and sinful Eve is paradigmatic for all women, whose post-Edenic bodies testify monthly to their sinful natures.”17 This “cosmic class” is the transformation from plural to singular, which Rosman has analyzed. The latter part of the excerpt is referring to the symbolic nature of the female body and cycle of menstruation that plays one of, if not the most significant role in the definition of the “Jewish woman.” Rabbi Benjamin Slonik was a one of the foremost rabbinic authorities in Eastern Europe, and he used his position to instruct Jewish women on the

laws of niddah.18 He produced a text titled “The Order of Women’s Commandments,” and much of the content explicitly details how the ideal Jewish woman must observe the laws of niddah as to remain pure in the company of Jewish men. Slonik recounts the origins of menstruation in the second chapter of this text—an indication to the reader its importance. He informs his audience that Eve forced Adam to eat the apple—literally hitting him until the apple was ingested—bringing a curse upon both Adam, and herself. Eve’s curse was to “have much torment and be afflicted by misfortune. And for this reason she must . . . have her period every month.”19 In presenting biology as history and making Eve representative of all Jewish women, the plural is collapsed into the singular. Moreover, this text was written in Yiddish, the language that women who were literate were most likely to know. Therefore, Slonik meant for women to read this themselves. The questions that historians must now address are how did different women in different historical contexts interact with such laws? Is there historical correspondence between what a Jewish woman was instructed to do by Slonik (and other rabbinic authorities) and how women observed the laws of niddah? These are not simple questions to answer, especially because of the lack of sources written by women in the early modern period; however, that does not invalidate the importance of these questions. A source that may provide some meaningful insights is tkhines. Men wrote musar literature primarily, if not exclusively, while tkhines were devotional prayers written by both men and women. In addition, these prayers were meant to be recited by women. These prayers are not radically or shockingly different from Slonik’s manual, and they still understand women as subservient to men. Weissler notes though, that from her study of tkhines, “by contrast [to musar literature], view women’s bodies in less mythical terms and more as rooted in physical realities.”20 In the medieval and early modern period with the rise of Jewish mysticism, the symbolic “female” and her bodily functions became an obsession, and it is possible that the tkhines were an attempt to reclaim the symbolic as the concrete.21 Furthermore, this female desire to reclaim, or even rebel against the notions of the female body as constructed by men can be found in the following comparison. Slonik’s acutely negative view of the Jewish woman’s relationship to Eve, and thus menstruation and the laws surrounding it, tkhines tend to “stress the rewards for observance and the positive religious significance of the acts.”22 One interpretation of this difference is that Jewish women, working within the established religious and halachic structures, attempted to rebel or revise their role in a patriarchal society. It must be noted that this paper’s aim is not to claim the historical truth or validity of an alternate narrative of early modern Jewish history; rather, its aim is to suggest questions and directions that unsettle the master narrative that entirely disregards the possibility of female agency. The notion of women’s agency in the early modern period is radical for many different reasons. Women were property, both literally and figuratively,

of the males in their lives—fathers, brothers, or husbands. Many social historians, such as Katz, have included women in their histories solely in the context of their relationship to men. In this context, analyzing the relationship between a husband and his wife, historians have mistakenly adopted another singular “Jewish woman” narrative. This is the lachrymose narrative in which women are seen as conquered, victimized individuals who have no agency whatsoever. It is not difficult to see from which sources historians have crafted this notion from: sources written exclusively by men. Solomon Luria and Moses Isserles, two of the most prominent figures in early modern Jewish history, both wrote on the issue of husbands being physically violent with their wives. And both men justify the domestic violence as punishment if it is warranted by the actions of the wife.23 This false dichotomy—the wife committing an act to deserve punishment, and also having no agency in the marriage—is clearly problematic and contradictory. Scholars who claim to include the experiences of women in their historical studies often commit a fallacy equal to that of omitting women’s voices altogether; they collapse women into woman. Moreover, is it the “Jewish woman,” as set out by the Jewish man that appears in their histories. Issues of agency apply both to the content of historical study—its subject—but to history itself. For example, when women did not factor into Katz’s later scholarship on Jewish society, he justified this neglect by positing: “’Women in this society were not creative or even active in these fields. . . The fact is that in traditional Jewish society women had no active role.’” 24 The implication in Katz’s methodology is that a Jewish woman’s status was inferior to a Jewish man’s, and this was required for the structure of Jewish society; history, not historiography, omitted the Jewish woman.25 Presumably, this is how Elior understood the situation as well. Davidman and Tenenbaum prove that this understanding of history—that history has some type of agency, its ability to do or not do—is simply another way in which scholars have silenced women’s voices. Historians have created streams and categories of history, such as political history, intellectual history, and Jewish history. These are entirely human constructs. These existing, “theoretical frameworks often missed much of what was distinctive about women’s experience,” simply because they were formulated by historians who perpetuated the androcentric methodology of the study of history.26 Jewish women’s lack of creativity and activity in public, as assumed by many scholars, does not reveal a historical truth—it reveals a gap in the study of early modern Jewish history. In the last thirty to forty years, there has been a flowering of feminist scholarship that has attempted to both make the existence of this gap known and attempt to close it. This paper falls into the first aspect of this new field of scholarship; it is meant to identify and explain the insufficiencies of previous historical studies. Through examining how prominent scholars in the field of Jewish Studies, such as Katz and Scholem, have perpetuated a master historical narrative that misunderstands Jewish women as “the Jewish woman,” future students of Jewish Studies can seek to

amend these fallacies. By examining how patriarchal movements and structures such as Sabbatianism and religious participation affected and were affected by women, this paper has opted to move away from the pre-existing theoretical frameworks and attempts to create new alternatives that seek to better account for Jewish women’s experiences. This academic movement is still in its infancy and has substantial challenges to overcome; however, “research on women and gender [in Jewish historiography] has already expanded our conceptualization of Jewish . . . life . . . [and] has revealed hitherto unrecognized complexities in the issue.”27 Only by recognizing and addressing the absence of Jewish women’s voices, experiences, and contributions can we finally make them present once again in early modern Jewish history.

Bibliography Davidman, L., & Tenenbaum, S. “Introduction” In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Elior, R. Man and Woman: Gender, Judaism and Democracy. Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2004. Fox, H., & Lewis, J. “Annotated Translation” In Many Pious Women: Edition and Translation. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Fram, E., & Slonik, B. My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007. Graetz, N. Silence is deadly: Judaism Confronts Wifebeating. Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, 1998. Haven, A. From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh: Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement. Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Instituut, 2012. Hyman, P. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. Koren, S. Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011. Rapoport-Albert, A., & Greniman, D. Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi: 1666--1816. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011. Rosman, M. “Jewish Women’s History: First Steps and False Starts--the Case of Jacob Katz.” In How Jewish is Jewish history? Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007. Rosman, M. The Early Modern European “Jewish Woman”. Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 33/34, 407-XIX. 2007. Retrieved from http://search. proquest.com/docview/883898777?accountid=14771 Scholem, G. Major trends in Jewish mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. Weinstein, R. Abraham Yagel Galico’s Commentary on Woman of Valor: Commenting on Women, Family and Civility. In Tov Elem: Memory, Community and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Societies, Essays in honor of Robert Bonfil. Jerusalem: Andel Institue of Jewish

Studies The Hebrew University The Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 2011. Weissler, C. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1998.

Endnotes Rachel Elior, Men and Women: Gender, Judaism, and Democracy (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2004), 10. 2 Moshe Rosman, “Jewish Women’s History: First Steps and False Starts--the Case of Jacob Katz” in How Jewish is Jewish history? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 173. 3 Lynn Davidman and Shelley Tenenbaum, “Introduction” In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 4 Ibid, 2. 5 Rosman, “Jewish Women’s History,” 174. 6 The italicization of woman, as opposed to women, will be addressed in the following paragraph. Rosman, “Jewish Women’s History,” 175 7 At least, in the second version of the creation story in Genesis. Gen 2:18-25. 8 Moshe Rosman, “The Early Modern European “Jewish Woman”” in Journal of Ukrainian Studies (2009), 1. 9 Alexander van der Haven, From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh: Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement (Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Instituut, 2007) 7. 10 Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi: 1666—1816 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), 175. 11 Haven, From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh, 19. 12 Gershom Scholem, Major trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 37. 13 Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 87. 14 Ibid., 81. 15 Ibid., 90. 16 Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron quoted from: Edward Fram and Benjamin Slonik, My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007), 37. 17 Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1998), 74. 18 Edward Fram, “Introduction” in My Dear Daughter, xv. 19 Benjamin Slonik, Dear Daughter, 160. 20 Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 74. 21 Sharon Faye Koren, Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011), xi. 22 Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs 71. 1

Naomi Graetz, Silence is deadly: Judaism Confronts Wifebeating (Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, 1998), 115-118. 24 Rosman, “Jewish Women’s History,” 180. 25 Rosman, “Jewish Women’s History,” n24: 173. This is further supported by Rosman’s assertion that “Katz implies that the justification for women’s inferior cultural and social position was its necessity for the proper functioning of Jewish society.” (176) 26 Lynn Davidman and Shelley Tenenbaum, “Introduction” In Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, 2. 27 Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 6. 23

Where East meets the West: Istanbul during the Nineteenth Century By Marcos Perez “A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.” – Benjamin Disraeli1 The city, a place seen as highly urbanized where a large and concentrated population of humans reside. Common images of a city conjured up are the great buildings, the theatres and opera houses, recreation centres, and bustling crowds. Yet, these images only represent the physical aspects of a city and do not account for its soul. This “soul,” defined by the aesthetic tastes of its populace, exemplifies the shared cultural values of its dwellers, unifying the city all the while enabling change as different cultural aesthetics and historical moments enter the foray. As such, the soul and the physical aspects of a city become intertwined and give rise to buildings that fulfill both practical and aesthetic functions. This combination is what gives character to a city. For example, New York City’s Times Square, serves a practical function as a junction between main arteries, s, but, with its electronic billboards and massive skyscrapers, it also has an aesthetic appeal that imbues the city with a soul. Istanbul is not any different. During the nineteenth century, the city, both its physical aspect and soul were transformed to create a massive metropolis that combined traditional Oriental themes with more modern Western ones, creating a wholly unique city. In this essay I will discuss how the aesthetic values, which are the soul of the city, changed due to an influx of foreign peoples and the introduction of western fashion and culture. Furthermore, I will discuss how the Ottomans did not replace their traditional values with western ones, but instead sought to combine them to create a unique, modern, and distinctively Ottoman aesthetic. The nineteenth century brought massive changes to the Ottoman Empire, many of which directly affected the culture and fashion of Istanbul. First, I will examine some of the various key events along the nineteenth century, which caused Istanbul’s cultural, and fashion scene to become a blend of western and oriental. During the reign of Selim III (1789-1807) reforms, based off of Western models, occurred in an attempt to stave off the stagnation of the empire. These reforms had varying degrees of success in their political,

societal, and military spheres. With the traditional social fabric remaining largely intact, these reforms had the effect of introducing western fashions and aesthetic tastes into Istanbul. For example, the military reforms brought forth the creation of several military academies akin to the academies in France. These schools used French as the language of instruction, housed a library imported from France and even included French instructors.2 As such, it is not difficult to see that many of the officers trained in these academies t adopted some French customs and fashions. Furthermore, due to the changes in the European concert of power, the Ottoman Empire could no longer afford to uphold its isolationist policies. As such, they began a diplomatic project to become a larger player in the European concert of power. One of the first things done to assure this goal was the establishment of permanent Ottoman embassies abroad.3 These embassies exposed some of the most elite Ottoman subjects to western culture and customs. These changes must not be overstated; Selim III’s reign did not bring massive cultural transformations to the city life of Istanbul. Still, these changes laid the foundations for the penetration of more western fashions in Istanbul in the later Tanzimat and Hamidian periods. The reign of Mahmud II (1808–1839) implemented various reforms that profoundly changed the culture of Istanbul’s upper cadres. The most obvious would be Mahmud II’s clothing reforms that mandated court officials to wear more streamlined westernized clothing instead of their more traditional garbs.4 This reform was a direct adoption of western fashion, which was already extremely popular amongst the upper cadres of Istanbul.5 This change of fashion should not be underestimated; the fashion of the city was changed not just by the shifting tastes of the educated elite, but also by royal decree. In 1829, Mahmud II issued a decree that forbade the wearing of traditional old fashioned robes and turbans, with the clergy being the only group excepted. In reaction, the Moroccan red fez, which became an icon of Turkish fashion, was willingly adopted by the denizens of Istanbul.6 Startford Canning, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Pera, gives us an insight on the new fashion: Every person who has been absent and now returned, notices the change, which has been most extraordinary. Very few years more, and not a turban will exist … employees of every description now wear the red cap, Cossack trousers, black boots, and plain red or blue cloak under the chin. No gold embroidery, no jewels, no pelisses.7 This new fashion was indeed a stark change from the traditional Muslim dress. New westernized universities, such as the Royal Medical Academy and the School for Surgeons were also formed. . Meanwhile old universities such as the School of Military Sciences and the Military School for Engineering were revitalized.8 All of these schools were made to train and educate new state officials and administrators; they were not made to educate the public. Because of this, the westernizing influence of the schools only reached the

upper cadres of society; nonetheless the change was still profound. Combined with the small groups of students who were sent abroad to study in western countries, who upon returning to the imperial city would naturally bring back some western customs, these new educational reforms created a new group of Ottoman intellectuals and administrators. They would later make up the powerful bureaucracy of the empire during the Tanzimat period, one which was responsible for many of the aesthetic and cultural changes in the capital. As such, this exposition of western cultures made the denizens of Istanbul, at least the upper cadres, change their cultural aesthetic along more western lines. During the Tanzimat period (1839-1876), the urban culture of Istanbul greatly changed. This was due to the westernizing reforms, the increased influence of the bureaucratic body and the mingling of soldiers from France and Britain during the Crimean War. A persistent component of these reforms was the importation of western specialists to work as teachers, industrialists, engineers, and bankers. Most of these Europeans settled in Galata and Pera and were instrumental in giving these regions their profound European flair. In particular, the Crimean War brought a significant, albeit temporary, number of Europeans to the city, with many stationed there as a base camp for the allied forces. Indeed, from the period of 1854 to 1856, Istanbul saw 310,000 French, 99,000 British, and 22,000 Sardinian troops pass through its ports.9 Istanbul was in effect overrun by foreign soldiers who stayed in the city for rest and recreation, and as refuge due to sickness or wounds.10 The French troops were quartered in the Gümüşuyu and Davutpaşa barracks while the British soldiers were quartered around Üsküdar.11 Due to the large number of soldiers being spread out fairly evenly in the city, it is not surprising that the locals and the foreigners interacted with them, and as such both sides reciprocated some cultural norms. The increased westernization of Instanbul bureaucrats gave rise to new aesthetic tastes that were more western in nature. As such, many of these educated elite sought to mimic the western intellectual culture of literature, adding further to the boom in the print culture throughout the empire.12 The press during the nineteenth century Istanbul was a major contributor to cultural shifts amongst all social groups within the city. Significantly, the government used the popular press to push forward its ideologue, acting as a medium to discuss the “founding debates of Islamic modernity.”13 Initially, in the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman popular press was used to give basic information such as market days, but later on in the Hamidian period, as the government began to lose control over the popular opinion, it began to push reformist ideology.14During the mid-nineteenth century, Istanbul was deeply affected by this new fad of the press; newspapers and journals were printed for the consumption of the populace. These prints were immensely popular, as shown by the circulation figure of 20,000 for the newspaper Tavsir-I Efkâr in 1862, when compared to the low literacy rates in the empire.15 These newspapers and journals opened up debate over various social

topics such as the rights of man and the current political situations.16 Indeed these debates soon became discussed amongst not just the elite of Istanbul. The availability of information through the newspaper combined with the mixed class nature of Istanbul’s public coffeehouses allowed for discourse between the upper and lower cadres of society to occur in a setting that fostered intellectual discussions.17 By the Hamidian period, starting in 1876, literacy rates increased and the public and private press expanded immensely, widening its scope to include very radical pro-western critics of Ottoman society. For example, in 1872 Namık Kemal published a scathing article called “Aile” in the magazine İbret. This piece criticizes the Turkish family by calling attention to its backwardness, internal dissension, violence, and its oppression of women and the youth.18 This theme of deconstruction appears repeatedly in the print culture of Istanbul. The writers, like Kemal, would attack the Turkish family by deeming it backwards while also attacking polygyny, arranged marriages, oppressive male-female relationships, and domestic divisions of labour. Furthermore, they would often compare the failures of the Turkish family to the success of the American, European, and even Japanese families. It is important to note that these ‘deconstructionists’ were one component of a radical minority, as the the majority of conservatives, islamicists and moderates were not against the Turkish family.19 The mainstream press would often use examples of foreigners as cautionary tales in order to reinforce the more traditional customs. The Galata quayside was often used as a model for western depravity due to its significant amount of wine shops, prostitution, drunkenness, violence, and foreignness.20 The closeness of Galata and its notorious reputation struck a chord with many of Istanbul’s citizens and served as an effective warning against European depravity and customs as shown in several articles written for the Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete.21 Yet it must be noted that the discussion on the virtues of western customs was heterogeneous and often in the same gazette one could find both sides of the discussion. For example, in the women’s press it was common to find illustrations, graphics, and advertisements for corsets beside an article that denounced corsets as hazardous to her health and moral fiber.22 In either case this shows that there was a moralizing aspect to the press and, in part, there was an attempt to deconstruct traditional Turkish or Islamic social structures so that a “superior” western model would replace them. This westernization of Istanbul’s society became popular amongst the upper cadres of society and gave birth to the concept of “alla franca.” Alla franca came to denote anything western that was perceived as good or fashionable; it was used to point out good taste.23 Although it began as a fad of the upper class, by the Hamidian period alla francahad been adopted by the middle classes. It not only changed the dress of Istanbul’s citizenry to be more aligned with contemporary western fashion,24 it also changed the interior design of the home by making it fashionable to have more western furniture such as chairs and tall tables, thus changing the familiar space towards more western lines.25 The debate between alla franca and alla turka was one that captured all of Istanbul’s society, but just as many western customs were adopted, many of the traditional ones were retained. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar gives a description of this dualism: Even the most westernized life-style was very local in its depth. All the konaks set tables for the end of the Ramadan fast, the harem

still existed, concubines were still being sold, the Palace was sending women out to be apprenticed, alongside the aide-de-camp was the black eunuch, next to the piano teacher alaturka music still reigned strong. No doubt, in the end, the society will have reached a new synthesis following a process of elimination and purification. The important thing, however, is the dualism in institutions and in the moral person.26 Istanbul’s denizens achieved a dualism where they had a mix of the progressive modern concepts of western thought with the rich traditional Turkish and Islamic customs. This blend of customs helped to create an identity, of both citizens and the city, of Istanbul that is unique to the world. During this time period of cultural change, Istanbul also underwent a physical transformation. Indeed, inspired by the more modern and scientific western way of urban planning, the Ottoman state wanted to make Istanbul into an Ottoman Paris or Vienna. As such, they attempted to regularize street sizes and enlarge them while eliminating dead ends.27 Another demand was that buildings would be kargir, which means that they would be first constructed out of brick and stone, and later concrete.28 This new policy had the effect of making Istanbul’s new constructions take a European flair as foreign specialists, such as Luigi Storari, were tasked with modernizing the city.29 It must be noted, though, that the regularization project was hampered by the reluctance of the state to demolish existing buildings and neighbourhoods. As such, significant progress was only achieved when earthquakes or fires destroyed vast swaths of the city.30 The state did not give the architects the ability to simply demolish homes as Haussmann was when he modernized Paris. Because of this, the modernization of Istanbul took an ad hoc nature and was not implemented in all parts of the city. This had the effect of giving Istanbul a unique skyline and geography, as the modern buildings and roads blended in with the old Ottoman monuments and mosques.31 It became a city that was both western and eastern. Furthermore, changes in cultural tastes also lead to a physical change in the city. Galata and Pera became more western and in these areas hotels, opera houses, theatres, and banks were all opened using kargir construction.32 It was also during this time period that palace construction along Tophane and the Bosphorus boomed. It was during the mid-nineteenth century that Istanbul’s famous palaces, such as Yıldız Sarayı, Küçüksu Kasrı, Çırağan Sarayı, and finally the most spectacular Dolmabahçe Sarayı, were constructed.33 All these palaces were built in western rococo style and became icons of the city’s Bosphoros waterline. New universities, which were constructed in the European style and kargir, also served to change the physical aspect of Istanbul. At the turn of the twentieth century Istanbul had changed drastically from the days of Selim III. The city was now imbued with the rich cultural tradition and aesthetics of its Muslim past and the modern aesthetic values that were fashionable all over Europe. This combination affected everything

on the city, from the way buildings were constructed all the way to what people wore 34and talked about on the street; it was a cultural transformation. During this period, Istanbul acquired an aesthetic culture that was uniquely its own and which to this day remains. If Rome represents conquest and Athens art, then Istanbul represents the very essence of the City.

Bibliography Çelik, Zeynep.The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Cengiz Kırlı, “Coffeehouses: Public Opinion in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, Public Islam and the Common Good. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 75-98. Clark, Peter. Istanbul a Cultural History. Oxford: Signal Books Limited, 2010. Duben, Alan, and Cem Behar. Istanbul households: marriage, family, and fertility, 1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Deal, Roger A. Crimes of Honor, Drunken Brawls, And Murder: Violence In Istanbul Under Abdülhamid II. Topkapı: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010. Disraeli, Benjamin. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2014. Accessed March 23, 2014. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/ benjamindi154149.html Faroqhi, Suraiya. Stories of Ottoman Men and Women. Istanbul: Muhittin Salih Eren, 2002. Freely, John. Istanbul the Imperial City. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Frierson, Elizabeth B. “Mirrors Out, Mirrors In: Domestication and rejection of the foreign in late-Ottoman women’s magazines (1875-1908), “in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies. Edited by D. Fairchild Ruggles. New York: SUNY Press, 2000. Hanioğlu, Şükrü M. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Endnotes Benjamin Disraeli. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2014. http://www. brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benjamindi154149.html. Accessed March 23, 2014. 2 Şükrü M Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 44. 3 Ibid, 48. 4 Ibid, 63. 5 Suraiya Faroqhi, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women, (Istanbul: Muhittin Salih Eren, 2002), 46. 1

John Freely, Istanbul the Imperial City (London: Penguin Books), 268. Ibid, 269. 8 Hanioğlu, Late Ottoman History, 63. 9 Peter Clark, Istanbul a Cultural History, (Oxford: Signal Books Limited, 2010), 103. 10 Ibid, 104. 11 Ibid, 103. 12 Ibid, 62. 13 Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Mirrors Out, Mirrors In: Domestication and rejection of the foreign in late-Ottoman women’s magazines (1875-1908),” in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, edited by D. Fairchild Ruggles, (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), 179. 14 Ibid. 15 Clark, Istanbul, 94. 16 Hanioğlu, Late Ottoman History, 94. 17 Cengiz Kırlı, “Coffeehouses: Public Opinion in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, Public Islam and the Common Good, (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 78. 18 Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul households: marriage, family, and fertility, 1880-1940, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 196. 19 Ibid. 20 Roger A Deal, Crimes of Honor, Drunken Brawls, And Murder: Violence In Istanbul Under Abdülhamid II, (Topkapı: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010), 121. 21 Frierson, “Mirrors in, Mirrors out,” 182. 22 Ibid, 183. 23 Faroqhi, Ottoman Men and Women, 41. 24 Depictions of this new fashion can be seen in the painting “Ladies” by Osman Hamdi Bey (1890s). 25 Faroqhi, Ottoman Men and Women, 58. 26 Duben and Behar, Istanbul households, 204. 27 Çelik Zeynep, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 51. 28 Ibid, 68. 29 Ibid, 53. 30 Freely, The Imperial City, 275. 31 Ibid, 279. 32 Clark, Istanbul, 107. 33 Freely, The Imperial City, 275-276. 6 7

A Medium for Change, A Medium for Hate: The Uses and Abuses of Radio during the Algerian Revolution and the Rwandan Genocide By Kevin Lunianga In Algeria and Rwanda the radio has been used as a vehicle for social change to both propagate and counter repression. It begins by delving into the histories of both countries, illustrating the radio’s importance in the context of Algeria’s colonial struggle with France and discussing the radio’s historical relevance for Rwanda. Some of the central similarities are the use of the radio to inform the public of the immediacy and the relevance of the Rwandan genocide and the Algerian revolution. While such similarities are significant, the bulk of this essay centralizes on key differences between Algeria and Rwanda. Primarily, it deconstructs questions around race and ethnicity, and shows that Algeria’s conflict presented a clearer binary, namely the French colonizer vs. the Algerian. Rwanda’s conflict, in contrast, involved a much more intricate structure where in many cases Tutsis and Hutus lived side-by-side, intermarried, and were much more integrated than their Algerian counterparts. This essay concludes with a discussion of the ideological differences within the radio messages and the role of hate propaganda to incite violence, particularly within the Rwandan case. Before engaging in any discussion on the Rwandan genocide or the Algerian revolution, it is crucial to recognize the effects of European colonialism on Sub-Saharan Africa. The evils of genocide can be traced back directly to colonial divide-and-rule strategies and the importation of racial ideologies, in this case privileging Tutsi individuals over their Hutu counterparts.1 The idea that the Tutsi were physiologically closer to the Europeans informed this problematic hierarchy. As a result, during colonial rule, the churches, schools, military, and bureaucratic structures were organized around the assumed racial superiority of the Tutsi.2 Similarly, the French subordination of the indigenous population in Algeria greatly contributed to revolutionary cause. The history of the French conquest in Algeria, which included the overrunning of villages by the troops, the confiscation of property, the raping of women, and the pillaging of a country, contributed to the birth and the crystallization of the Algerian Revolution.3 As such, it is vital to centre colonialism and European exploitation when discussing the Rwandan Genocide and the Algerian Revolution. The Rwandan Genocide occurred over the course of a hundred days, during which approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were murdered, many hacked to death by their machete-wielding neighbours.4 Significantly,

the radio conditioned, facilitated, and legitimized violence and thus became a tool for the mobilization of genocide.5 Over the four years leading up to the 1994 Genocide, the radio and other media had engaged in hate propaganda against the Tutsi population, such as allegations of a Tutsi “infiltration” into the economy, their monopolization of credit at the banks, and their disproportionate share of high-paying, professional positions.6 Radio programs in Rwanda played a crucial role in vilifying the Tutsi population, which, in turn, legitimized violence against them. The radio in Rwanda heightened the sense of fear, danger, and urgency, inciting the perception that listeners must act.7 To note, while the violent intent of radio broadcast remains singularly clear, how the Hutu Rwandese reacted varies. It is necessary to acknowledge the diverse responses to the radio propaganda otherwise one would portray all Hutus as easily influenced or controlled by messages from the media. In contrast, the radio played a different role during the Algerian Revolution.. Before 1954, Radio-Alger remained the de facto spokesperson of French Algeria. For the settler, Radio-Alger represented a daily reminder of rightfulness of French culture, derailing against the seduction of “going native.”8 Undeniably Radio-Alger was Eurocentric, centring French colonial authority and settler entitlement. Radio-Alger justified French occupation of Algeria under the guise of a “civilizing” mission. Come 1954, however, the radio established new meanings: insults and accusations against native Algerians disappeared, replaced with words of encouragement.9 The emergence of A Voice of Fighting Algeria, a radio station that represented the Algerian experience, provided honest accounts surrounding the Revolution and permanently changed the use of the radio.10 Algeria’s case represented resistance, one that acted as a defense mechanism to the colonial monopoly of the media. In contrast to Algeria, the radio in Rwanda represented an offensive mechanism used to hurt, annihilate, and destroy all Tutsi and Tutsi sympathizers. Rwanda’s case, in short, promotes compliance with the oppressive Hutu majority. An interesting similarity between both countries was the use of the radio to reach large masses with immediacy. Radio was thought to be particularly influential during the Rwandan Genocide because oral tradition remained strong, illiteracy was widespread, and few Rwandans had foreign language skills It must be acknowledged also that there are shortfalls in terms of the radio’s reach and scope. Rwanda’s topography – several mountains and numerous volcanoes - makes the country a site for widespread FM broadcasts.11 In refutation of the colonialist argument that settlers improved the literacy levels of the native population, the radio was so influential in Rwanda and Algeria precisely because of the illiteracy throughout the two respective countries. Significantly, the radio bridged the (il) literary barrier only when the listener understood the language of the broadcast. Although this may be an obvious statement, the language choice of the broadcast reflected both its intended and excluded audiences. For Rwanda, Kinyarwanda was the main language used for radio broadcasts, restricting the information to its speakers, which rarely included diplomats or individuals of Belgian ancestry.

In a sense then, the radio reinforced the point that Rwanda’s conflict was largely inaccessible to those who did not speak the language. In contrast, A Voice of Fighting Algeria offered broadcasts in both Arabic and French. The broadcasting in French of the programs of Fighting Algeria was to liberate the enemy language from its historic meanings: the French language lost its accused character, revealing itself to be capable of also transmitting, for the benefit of the nation, the messages of truth that the latter awaited.12 Algeria’s case represents a politic of reclamation where a language that once represented oppression and coercion was repossessed and used as a tool of empowerment. The use of French allowed for some of the French settlers to critically understand the Revolution through a different perspective. Most importantly, the choice of languages highlighted the complexity regarding nationalist politics present in both the Algerian and Rwandan conflicts. Narration of and control over the radio differed significantly in Algeria and Rwanda. Algeria encountered several problems when attempting to broadcast The Voice of Fighting Algeria – namely, the power dynamic between the French settler and the Algerian, wherein the settlers had a stronghold on socio-economic resources in the country. The colonial monopoly over the broadcasting systems in Algeria meant the programs were systematically jammed, and the Voice of Fighting Algeria soon became inaudible.13 Thus, it is important to factor in the role of fear among the colonial authorities, namely with their need to interrupt the broadcasts because they gave hope to the Algerian. By means of the radio, a technique rejected before 1954, the Algerian people decided to re-launch the Revolution. To listen to the radio was to listen to Revolution; For the Algerian to exist, the radio needed to be at the Revolution’s stead.14 The quest for knowledge, for the unbiased reporting sought by The Voice of Fighting Algeria contrasted with Rwanda’s case, which mainly propagates hate propaganda. In Rwanda, the radio communicated a colonial power structure, one that perpetuated racial supremacy and propagated an anti-Tutsi view of the crisis.15 The Inkotanyi (Tutsi) were considered foreign invaders who wanted to conquer Rwanda, with the term inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” becoming synonymous with Tutsi. The Hutu controlling the radio outlets exhibited violent behaviour, from the dehumanizing rhetoric to the eventual promotion of a systematic murder against the Tutsi and their supporters.16 Such hate propaganda was not found in Algeria, suggesting Rwanda’s colonial history has left strong repercussions on its population; the settler’s animalization of Africans was now done by fellow Africans, all under the foundation of white supremacist colonialism. Nonetheless, by the time of the Genocide, intermarriage was common among the Rwandese, making the Hutu and Tutsi largely indistinguishable.17 Such a reality complicated the ethnic binary and the radio’s role in propagating the Genocide against the Tutsi. Many Hutus were mistaken for Tutsi, as the processing of reading one’s ethnicity remained under the colonial racial hierarchy. Perhaps because of Rwanda’s history of “double colonization,” as defended by the Hamitic hypothesis, both Radio Rwanda and RTLM referred

not only to Tutsi wanting political control, but that the Tutsi were obtaining such control with the help of colonialists and Hutu sympathizers. As such, there were not only divisions between Hutu and Tutsi, but also between Hutu in the North and South. At times, regional particularities were more important than cultural generalizations, making ethnicity-only explanations of the genocide insufficient.18 Though not as intricate as Rwanda, Algeria’s situation still contained several complexities.19 Eager for objective news, many Algerians would rely solely on French newspapers. The fact that these democratic papers came from France illustrated how some of the French were critical of colonial Algeria and supported the struggle for Algerian liberation and independence. In other words, not all of the French shared the same mentality. Contrastingly, not all Algerians shared the same perspective on liberation. For an Algerian to ask for L’Express, L’Humanité, or Le Monde was akin to publicly confessing their allegiance to the Revolution.20 The fact that several newspaper sellers were police informants only further emphasizes the suppression of revolutionaries by fellow Algerians. On a side note, the use of newspapers throughout the Revolution demonstrates the limited influence of the radio. Algerians used and relied on various forms of the media – not simply the radio – to mobilize for independence. Interestingly, the Rwandese case also relied on more than just the radio. The “infiltration” of the Tutsi was described by the magazine Kangura as a “disease” that if gone untreated immediately, it would destroy all the Hutu.21 The multiplicity of media outlets reminds us of the need to understand the radio as part of a much larger mechanism in both Rwanda and Algeria. To conclude, this paper has investigated historical uses of the radio as a tool for social change in Algeria and Rwanda. It has explored the history of the radio within both cases and their particular impacts on their communities. While both countries used the radio to inform the masses, Algeria did so by providing radio service in more than one language while Rwanda only offered it only in Kinyarwanda. While A Voice of Fighting Algeria represented an honest perspective on the Revolution and acted as a defense mechanism to the French Algeria’s oppressive environment, RTLM represented an offensive mechanism to encourage violence and the eradication of the Tutsi. One of the most powerful mediums throughout the history of technological communications, the case studies showed the radio’s uses and abuses, one that served as both a channel for social change and genocidal hatred.

Bibliography Baisley, Elizabeth. “Genocide and Constructions of Hutu and Tutsi in Radio Propaganda.” Race & Class 55, no. 3 (2014): 38-59. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Hintjens, Helen. “Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda.” Ethnicities 8, no. 1 (2008): 5-41. Hintjens, Helen. “Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 37, no. 2 (1999): 241-286. Straus, Scott. “What is the Relationship between Hate Radio and Violence? Rethinking Rwanda’s “Radio Machete.”” Politics & Society 35, no. 4 (2007): 609-637. Timmermann, Wibke Kristin. “The Relationship between Hate Propaganda and Incitement to Genocide: A New Trend in International Law Towards Criminalization of Hate Propaganda?” Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (2005): 257-282.

Endnotes Helen Hintjens, “Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda,” Ethnicities 8, no. 1 (2008): 23. 2 Helen M. Hintjens, “Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 37, no. 2 (1999): 272. 3 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 45. 4 Wibke Kristin Timmermann, “The Relationship between Hate Propaganda and Incitement to Genocide: A New Trend in International Law Towards Criminalization of Hate Propaganda?” Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (2005): 258. 5 Scott Straus, “What is the Relationship between Hate Radio and Violence? Rethinking Rwanda’s “Radio Machete,”” Politics & Society 35, no. 4 (2007): 618. 6 Timmermann, “The Relationship between Hate Propaganda and Incitement to Genocide”, 276. 7 Ibid, 279. 8 Ibid, 71. 9 Ibid, 89. 10 Ibid, 95. 11 Elizabeth Baisley, “Genocide and Constructions of Hutu and Tutsi in Radio Propaganda,” Race & Class 55, no. 3 (2014.): 39. See also Straus, “What is the Relationship between Hate Radio and Violence”, 617. 53 1

Ibid, 89. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 85. 14 Ibid, 93. 15 Straus, “What is the Relationship between Hate Radio and Violence”, 630. 16 Timmermann, “The Relationship between Hate Propaganda and Incitement to Genocide”, 264. See also Baisley, Genocide and Constructions, 49. 17 Ibid, 47. 18 Ibid, 42. 19 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 80. 20 Ibid, 81. 21 Timmermann, “The Relationship between Hate Propaganda and Incitement to Genocide”, 279. 12 13