This paper examines the establishment of standards of informed consent for sterilization from the viewpoint of the medical profession in the United States. Sterilization was previously a tool of eugenics, the science of racial betterment that developed around the turn of the twentieth century. Eugenicists discouraged the reproduction of “unfit” citizens and defined it as costly and harmful to the society. To prevent the reproduction of the “unfit,” eugenicists would segregate them from the rest of the population and subsequently came to favor the more cost-effective solution of sterilization. A number of states began to enact eugenic sterilization laws, and in 1927 the Supreme Court validated the right of the states to sterilize their “unfit” citizens.

The formal eugenics movement concluded by the end of the baby boom, but forced sterilization did not end. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fear of overpopulation reduced doctors’ resistance to the efforts of “fit” women toward birth control. Consequently, the rates of contraceptive sterilization rose steadily throughout the 1970s. This concealed a new pattern for forced sterilization. Instead of secretly performing surgeries, doctors began to require their patients to sign consent forms for surgeries that they did not want or did not understand.

In the late 1960s, consumer groups and health activists started to demand increased oversight of medical practice, the establishment of strict standards of informed consent, and the strengthening of the patients’ position within the doctor-patient relationship. Their demands led to the creation of clear standards of informed consent and the adoption of these standards by hospitals across the country, which slowed forced sterilization upon delivery by prohibiting doctors from obtaining consent from patients under duress and the influence of anesthesia and by requiring that they explain all the risks and side effects of surgery. However, doctors interpreted informed consent differently and a number of doctors refused to concede their professional authority to patients.

Forcibly sterilized the “unfit” filed lawsuits in defense of their reproductive rights and antisterilization abuse activists fought for the establishment of federal sterilization guidelines, because the existing policies failed to protect the reproductive rights of the “unfit.” A significant reduction in reports of forced sterilization and in forced sterilization litigation suggests that the practice declined in the mid-to-late 1970s. This can be attributed to the federal sterilization guidelines or to the changes of the standards of informed consent within the medical community.

However, even after the courts and legislatures established formal protocols for medical decision-making, reports of doctors’ violation of the federal sterilization guidelines continued to emerge. It is possible that informed consent conceals the coerciveness of sterilization, forcing specific people to “choose” sterilization, especially as medical technologies advances beyond the comprehension of non-professional people and the medical profession changes the interpretation of informed consent.

This article examines the controversy over the issue of health insurance in the enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935. When President Roosevelt set up the Committee on Economic Security (CES) to draft the social security bill in June 1934, it was generally anticipated that health insurance would be included in the bill along with other social insurances. However, when the CES completed its final report in preparation for the drafting of the bill in early 1935, it was decided not to include health insurance on the grounds that it needed further consideration. Previous research has revealed that personal conflict between technical staff and medical doctors in the Medical Advisory Board (MAB) of the CES led to a stalemate that prevented the inclusion of health insurance in the bill.

Two prominent public health specialists, Edgar Sydenstricker and I.S. Falk, were at the center of the technical staff who strongly advocated the introduction of a public health insurance system. They were seconded from the Milbank Memorial Fund to the CES to draft a health insurance plan as ordered by President Roosevelt. Their initial plan was based upon the model bill of the American Association for Labor Legislation and was favored by most of the CES members, many of whom were familiar with labor laws. But they gradually had to change their plan under pressure from doctor members of the MAB. The American Medical Association also exercised strong influence on doctor members to oppose any type of public health insurance. Based on primary sources of the MAB and its members, this article explores the circumstances under which Sydenstricker and Falk were forced to change their original health insurance plan in response to the criticism of doctor members and how the emasculation of their plan limited the scope of the debate on the issue of health insurance thereafter.

Sydenstricker and Falk originally proposed that health insurance cover all working people under a certain level of income to prevent people from falling into poverty because of illness. However, doctor members argued that states should be given leeway to exclude lower income people, so that physicians could maintain the existing level of income without increasing the number of patients. After a heated debate in MAB, Sydenstricker and Falk reluctantly accepted a compromise about health insurance coverage. Other parts of their plan also met various challenges from opponents of public health insurance and in the end doctor members proposed that priority be given to an increase in federal grants to public health services over health insurance.

In reaction to such an emasculation of Sydenstricker and Falk’s original plan, President Roosevelt and the CES decided to abandon the idea of including health insurance in the social security bill. In addition, this weakening of their plan also contributed to legitimizing the argument of opponents of public health insurance, insurance companies in particular, that public health insurance would be unnecessary in the United States, if middle-class people were insured by commercial health insurance and lower income people were given free or cheap medical service through welfare programs.

Through an inquiry into the meanings of the neologism of disease names in Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, this paper tries to locate the postmodern novel as a fruitful “failure” that demonstrates a crucial aspect of today’s left-wing politics: the inability of New-Left thinking to criticize the shift of welfare-state liberalism to neoliberalism, where, as argued by such scholars as David Harvey, Pierre Bourdieu and Nikolas Rose, the New-Left agenda even seems to encourage neoliberalization. From this perspective, Vineland, a narrative that depicts the life in 1984 of an aged hippie under the Reagan administration, is to be seen as a comic attempt to shed light on how postmodernism cuts itself off from the reality of politics.

The politics of identity, or biopolitics, governs the retrospective narrative that constitutes the novel’s main body. The biopolitical mode is analyzed as consisting of two important tactics of postmodern fiction: the deconstructive politics of parody, which commits to fluidity of identities, and the displacement of history by memory, which virtually defines the past as something to be reexperienced. We briefly trace in the paper how biopolitics, or, as Michel Foucault defines, a form of political rationality that finds the notion of population as its object, results today in these postmodern politics of identity and experience.

The theories of the politics of parody had their heyday in the early 90s, as is shown by such books as Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble together with the general acceptance of Jacques Derrida’s advocate of deconstruction as the postmodern politics of resistance. The novel’s opening episode, the old hippie’s successful fraud to get a government check for the mentally ill, symbolizes the postmodern politics, where resistance to the System takes the form of the complicity in it. On the other hand, the 90s are also seen as the time when critical theories and contemporary cultural works were both interested in re-living the past in such forms as New Historicism, Trauma Theory and the conception of what could be called postmodern ghost, as exemplified by Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the popular film Ghost. The novel’s body of the retrospective narrative saliently demonstrates the desire to experience, rather than represent, the past, making the fragmented text something like a labyrinth of jumbled chronicles.

The novel grows into something comic because all the important plots in it are abruptly worked out by president Reagan’s whimsical decision to use the budget ax, an exercise of Reaganomics. In other words, the text ultimately shows that everything politically important is fundamentally decided by the process of neoliberalization, but, at the same time, that the novel is unable to deal with it in any significant way. This is because the postmodern tactics that decide the form of the text concern the biopolitical realm of identity and recognition, detaching itself from the political hard fact of the economic policy; they are biopolitical instead of being political.

The structure of the novel, all in all, basically follows Fredric Jameson’s critical definition of postmodernism when its autonomy is gained at the cost of the suppression of the economic. This is why the novel should be seen as a failure; yet, it also would not be far-fetched to see in the comic extravaganza the absurdity not of the novel, but of Reaganomics.

Despite past lack of awareness among scholars of the boardinghouse as a literary genre, the boardinghouse novel or what David Faflik calls “boardinghouse letters” is a significant framework because it demonstrates examples of how people responded to the emerging metropolitan domesticity in the nineteenth century. Fictions and essays surrounding the boardinghouse written by Victorian moralists and writers, however, have often given boardinghouses a negative image. Antebellum America was the golden age of home; the era stands out historically for advocating domestic ideology in which the suburban, middle-class, single household was believed to play an important role as a protector of morality and privacy against the “contagion” of the public realm. To domestic ideologues, the boardinghouse appeared to be a kind of taboo and an immoral counterpart to the idealized home. The authors of moralistic novels and prescriptive fiction warned the readers of how the “selfish” young wives, the protagonists in what we may call “anti-boardinghouse novels,” behaved foolishly by abandoning their housekeeping for “fashionable boardinghouses.“

Given the appropriateness of the term “anti-boardinghouse novels,” this essay examines Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1846 novel “Boarding Out”: A Tale of Domestic Life, arguing that she revealed the middle-class husband’s complicity with domestic ideology, and that she presented political ideas without generating controversy. This book can be read as a typical anti-boardinghouse novel, because it simply criticizes the heroine’s folly of boarding. Hale’s narrative, however, produces the paradoxical effects. Although the author’s agreement with the prohibition against the middle-class boarding seems obvious, the text also acknowledges one of the cultural realities of its period ― the development of a relationship between the individuals in the urban community in which people extended help to all who sought it, thereby demonstrating the possibility of mutual aid. With the paradoxical narrative, or “unexceptional eloquence,” Hale tells us a different story.

To readers familiar with a standard anti-boardinghouse plot, “Boarding Out” may seem somewhat strange. Hepsy, the wife of Robert Barclay, never seeks forgiveness for her boardinghouse life, defiant about her husband’s bankruptcy and the death of their child. Instead, Robert himself is the person who most abhors the boardinghouse and craves for the ideal middle-class private home. Milette Shamir’s “domestic-division plot” elucidates this. Unlike the doctrine of separate spheres, splitting and gendering the spaces within the home make two opposing realms: the parlor (the feminine space of domesticity) and the study (the husband’s private space of retirement). In antebellum America, men ruled in the study, while women oversaw the parlor. With this in mind, the study can be viewed as a site in which the masculine subjectivity could be formed and in which the patriarchal power that had been Jost in feminized spheres could be retrieved. The sacredness of Robert’s study is found most clearly in a scene in which an auction is conducted in the Barclays’ kitchen and the parlor, where strangers gather to barter for the family’s possessions. Economic intrusion into the domestic sphere leads to chaos, but only his study remains locked, and the wife, leaving home for the boardinghouse, becomes a threat to its privacy ― privacy that the husband needs to reclaim.

In the last confession Robert makes for his “transgressions,” he identifies his first misstep as his abandonment of “simplicity,” connoting republican simplicity as well as “republican motherhood.”

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Since 1964, when Henry M. Littlefield argued the case for seeing it an allegory of the political and economic situation at the time Frank Baum was writing, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been discussed by many succeeding critics as a story depicting the monetary debate between gold standard and bimetallism. The last decade of 19th century saw a furious political debate concerning which metal should be the standard of American money: gold alone or both gold and silver. Baum’s Oz, which is full of references to many gold and silver articles, can be read, as Littlefield and other critics do, as an allegory of the conflict between the case for the gold standard and that for bimetallism. Taking these readings into account, however, this paper tries to present another monetary allegorical reading of Oz: Oz as an allegory of paper money.

Dorothy and her three companions travel to the Emerald City, where everything appears green, the color that United States bank notes have borne since the first Demand Note issued in 1862. There they met the wizard Oz, who turns out to be just a human and not a wizard at all. They call Oz a “humbug” and this term reminds us of paper money because in an earlier age it was used to mock people who supported the use of paper money. Rather than just granting their wishes for free, Oz demands that Dorothy and her friends kill the Wicked Witch of the West in return. This transaction is based on the logic of economy, involving as it does an exchange of equivalents.

Oz cannot give the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion what each of them wants. Being just a human, not a wizard, it is beyond him. While he is unable to supply their wants in a concrete sense, he does indirectly furnish them with an approximation of their desires. He gives them not what they want but “what they think they want,” and he “makes them believe” they get what they want. This is similar to the mechanism through which paper money works. Paper money, which does not have any intrinsic value, encourage people suspend their disbelief, and makes them willing to accept it as something valuable. Just as in the Emerald City where everything falsely appears green thanks to the green glasses people wear, paper money, which lacks intrinsic value, is accepted as something valuable, thanks to its ‘wizardly power.’

Before Oz, Baum foreshadows this device in an essay written earlier in his career in which horses are equipped with green goggles so that their grass can be replaced with shavings. This episode has an idea in common with a famous illustration by Thomas Nast. David Wells’ Robinson Crusoe’s Money warned of the potential inflation associated with paper money and depicted how useless paper money not backed by real metal would be in the end. However, the famous illustration by Thomas Nast, entitled “Milk-Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk,” that appears in Wells’ work and is intended to lend support to his theory, unintentionally exposes the limit of Wells’ theory. Distinct from any other commodities, what is expected of money is to work as a medium of exchange, a scale of value and a means of saving, and its value is not based on consumption or use. Therefore, at least in this respect, whether it has intrinsic value or not is somewhat irrelevant. Money is the representation of value, and it is the only medium whose work is representation itself.

It draws further suggestive parallels to examine the contemporary paper money of the 19th century.

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In the United States, where the federal government is only moderately committed to cultural development, private sector entities function as support groups for cultural affairs. Corporations and foundations are major funding sources for museums. Although private sector money has a direct and sometimes enormous effect on collections, the participation of corporations and foundations in shaping history museum exhibitions and educational programs has been overlooked in museum studies. This article examines this critical and complementary history museum - private sector connection by focusing on the 2000 acquisition process for the George Washington Lansdowne portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG exhibits the history of the United States through portraits of extraordinary people. As part of the Smithsonian Institute, 60 to 70% of the NPG’s budget comes from the US government and the rest is raised through its own efforts. In other words the NPG is a quasi-governmental entity.

NPG acquired the Lansdowne portrait with the support of a private foundation. This full-length portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1797 was a gift from a Philadelphian merchant to the Marquis of Lansdowne. It had been on loan to the NPG since the gallery’s opening in 1968. In the fall of 2000, the British owner of the work suddenly announced to the NPG that he would auction the painting unless the gallery purchased it. The NPG made a public appeal, describing the situation to potential donors as a national crisis. As a result, the Nevada-based Donald W. Reynolds Foundation saved the Lansdowne portrait from what they considered to be a patriotic crisis. Through the course of the purchase process, a painting that had been in a foreign collection for two centuries was transformed into a “national icon” and eventually a “national treasure,” revered as an equal to the Declaration of Independence and the Stars and Stripes. This private funding process not only saved the painting, it also altered its status.

It must also be noted that 9/11 changed the meaning of this portrait. George Washington has been endowed with various qualities through the centuries: he has been seen as everything from demi-god to ordinary father. Then, as symbolized by the fire fighters’ self-sacrificing behavior at Ground Zero, post 9/11 society came to view the Lansdowne Washington portrait as an image of a great self-sacrificing figure who led and saved a young nation.

As part of the process of receiving the considerable funds needed for the acquisition, the Lansdowne portrait went from being a loaned work displayed among other portraits to a national treasure and representation of patriot self-sacrifice. These changes result from the integrated and complementary collaboration between the NPG and a private foundation, a situation completely unlike the general perception of a hostile relationship between public and private interests. The Lansdowne acquisition case reveals how the private sector is not a mere funding source, but rather is a vital participant in the shaping and interpretation of history at museums.

This article examines the development of Women Strike for Peace (hereafter referred to as WSP) in the 1960s and the early 1970s by focusing on their relationship with other social movements and on the political and social backgrounds of the WSP members. WSP was one of the most significant women’s antinuclear/antiwar movements in the US. This movement comprised mainly white, middle-class, and middle-aged women and was prevalent in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast areas of the US. WSP began in 1961 by demanding nuclear disarmament both in the US and the USSR. After the Test Ban Treaty between the US and the USSR in 1963, WSP gradually shifted its focus to protesting against the War in Vietnam.

Previous studies on WSP in the US have explored its activism from mainly the gender perspective. These studies have regarded WSP as a movement that successfully utilized the discourse of motherhood to obtain support from white middle-class women. Motherhood, however, was not the only driving force of WSP. In addition, WSP attempted to collaborate with racially and economically different groups, particularly in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. For a complete understanding of the WSP’s activism in the 1960s, it is indispensable to investigate the myriad forces that shaped WSP in this decade. Thus, I would like to argue that WSP repeatedly redefined its tactics and strategies according to the rapidly changing conditions in American society and politics during the 1960s.

This article particularly delineates two points. The first is the relationship between WSP and the other social movements in the 1960s. In the first half of the 1960s, WSP was reluctant to tackle social issues other than militarism.Within the context of the second half of the 1960s, WSP became to deal with broader social issues such as civil rights, student activism, and welfare rights. The WSP’s paradigm shift partly reflected contemporary social and political circumstances such as the spate of the race riots in the northern cities of the US and the intensifying governmental suppression of radical activists. The second point is the backgrounds of the WSP members who had long careers as activists. These middle-aged women were active in social movements before World War II for political and economic equality. Their political and social backgrounds also influenced the direction of WSP’s activism in the 1960s.

Through an examination of WSP’s relationship with other social movements and the political and social experiences of its members, this study will enable us to situate women’s peace movements not only in the scholarship of women’s history but also in the broader contexts of social movements in twentieth-century America and of the politics of the 1960s. In addition, this study will also shed new light on our image of the social movements of the 1960s wherein young college students frustrated by the conservative 1950s played a prominent role.

This essay examines the literary self-fashioning of Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography in terms of politeness and sociability. Looking only at the way to wealth and the pursuit of moral perfection in part 1 and 2, literary critics have long regarded his self-identity as a “self-made man” or “the first American.” Recent historical studies reveal, however, that the real Franklin was cosmopolitan rather than an American nationalist and a person who pursued the public good rather than private interests. Therefore, analyzing the text in terms of his relationship with others and his concern for public affairs, this essay reinterprets his Autobiography in the context of 18th-century social and intellectual history.

Politeness and sociability was a social norm spread among the upper- and middling-sorts during the commercialization of the 18th-century Anglo-American world. It emphasized sophisticated manners which became a necessity in order to be a gentleman. Moreover, this norm enabled people to develop public spirit through social interaction with others. Colonists, including Franklin, shared these values through many devices, such as clubs and balls as well as the Spectator and John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education, etc.

Franklin himself acquired politeness and sociability through literacy, the skill of conversation, and swimming. First, he understood literacy as a “principle means of my advancement” to gentleman, so he learned “the manner in writing” by using the Spectator. Second, he corrected his habit of conversation with “the Socratic method” in order to please others. Third, his practice in swimming clarifies the relationship between body and mind in the self-fashioning of the 18th-century man. It was essential for a gentleman to discipline his body as well as to control his mind. Thus, the description of his self-education in part 1 was written as a process to fashion himself into a fine gentleman rather than a self-made man.

The companionship of others is important for the self-fashioning of Franklin in the text. The norm of politeness and sociability provided him with the criteria to evaluate a person. He emphasized the ability to please others in conversation and acquired “better habits of conversation” through discussion with the members of the Junto. Franklin’s usage of “friends” indicates that he had business interests among those in his club as well as his patrons. He often acquired his friends by literary sociability. Such social capital was fundamental to his business success.

At the same time, Franklin developed his public spirit through learning politeness and sociability. At the beginning of part 1, he foretold his later establishment as a public-spirited gentleman in part 3 by representing his ancestors and his young self as his archetype. The episode of the founding of the subscription\ library illustrates the process by which his private sociability with friends developed into the public sphere by the mediation of books. From this viewpoint, his famous 13 virtues aim at establishing his public spirit rather than mere self-discipline. Thus, the whole design of the Autobilography is based upon his self-identity as public-spirited gentleman.