Gender & Sexuality
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Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016648550/. ↩︎
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Susan Saxe has a sparse Wikipedia entry. She was Nancy Gertner’s first case, which the latter writes about in In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate Beacon Press, 2011), chap. 1 (sample with salient details). ↩︎
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Lucinda Franks, “Return of the Fugitive,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1994, https://archive.ph/5mJ5P. ↩︎
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“Fay Hubbard, 13-year Old Suffragette” in New York on February 9, 1910.
“Suffragette! Suffragette!” This is the cry of little Fay Hubbard as she goes through the crowd at the suffragette meetings in New York selling copies of the paper… Miss Hubbard is a niece of Mrs. E. Ida Williams, the recording secretary of the Suffragette…
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Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919). Dr. Walker served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. She was a Medal of Honor recipient, a suffragette, and a dress reformer.
'Nothing but the Truth' (Sony Pictures, 2008)
I recently watched “Nothing but the Truth” and found it to be engaging because of how rooted it is in its time, even as the issues it treats are much more broadly relevant. At its heart is the freedom of the press versus the federal government’s powers of coercion in ostensible national security matters. Womanhood and especially motherhood are also important to the story, with mainstream gender norms employed to help viewers relate to (or feel no sympathy for) the woman who the government attempts to coerce. The film is a work of fiction, but its author, Rod Lurie, draws on real events for its initial premise.
During the movie’s first ten or twenty minutes, I got nostalgic vibes because there is a news-making national newspaper in DC that hasn’t been corrupted by a billionaire, a newspaper whose print distribution still matters. There is an FBI that follows the law, and reporters who think that officials lying is newsworthy, even if short attention spans run counter to this belief. The DC location, regardless of where it was actually filmed, was also familiar because of the occasional overlap between work life and home life, even if the filmmakers restricted that overlap to the two main women characters, a journalist and an outed spy.
As the film went on, I was reminded of how out-of-control the federal government can get when pursuing an administration’s aims because the judiciary typically defers to the executive branch on national security matters. The movie shows the U.S. government trying to coerce a reporter to give up her source: it jails her for contempt during a grand jury investigation. Her loss of liberty lasts for nearly a year before there is even a court decision on the specific issues involved. Images of the reporter being transported in leg chains still resonate today. The CIA adds an additional low by threatening its own outed agent, reminding her about her upcoming custody hearing.
Since the journalist and the outed spy are both moms, the film connects the two on a personal level by situating their daughters in the same school. The women both volunteer in the school, but don’t know each other personally in the beginning, although the journalist knows the other woman’s child because of her particular volunteer duties. (If any fathers volunteer, it doesn’t come up.) Why is motherhood relevant to the plot? The jailed and then imprisoned journalist pays a high personal cost, being unable to see her young son and probably losing her husband. At the same time, this personal cost can be interpreted by some viewers as her putting a principle ahead of her duty as a mother.
At the very end of the movie, we see that the journalist’s initial unintentional source (before she began her actual reporting) had been her son’s classmate, the daughter of the outed CIA agent. This makes her principled stand for freedom of the press also about protecting a child. Perhaps, for some people, this lets her off the hook for leaving her own son without a mother for so long. Unfortunately, it also almost overshadows the constitutional issues behind her refusal to be coerced by the U.S. government. Or is that the point? Is this another example of the personal manifesting as political?
I enjoyed the pre-Code film "Ladies They Talk About" (Warner Bros., 1933), starring Barbara Stanwyck. This fast-paced drama features a bank robbery, a revivalist with a radio program, and an interesting portrayal of inmates in a women's ward at San Quentin State Prison. The film also offers sex appeal and comic relief.
Image: Ad clipped from the studio's pressbook ("merchandising plan") at the Internet Archive, archive.org….
'Women and Children First' by Theo Matejko, ca. 1939
Source: "'Bombs Over Us': Prophetic Drawings by a German Artist," Life, September 11, 1939, pp. 27--28, via "a book … recently published in Germany," presumably Das Theo Matejko-Buch: Zeichnungen als Aufzeichnungen aus zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Kommodore-Verlag, 1938).
This drawing imagining an air war coming to Berlin was one of a series that Theo Matejko conceived before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. It seems to convey antiwar sentiment, but the artist supported the Nazi regime, and he regularly contributed to the propaganda magazine, Die Wehrmacht. Given this context, his drawing and the following public explanation might be understood as projection instead.
An idea which came to me years ago with unholy force and persistence was the image of an air attack over a big city in some future war. I saw in this dreadful vision the merciless heavens pouring destruction upon peaceful people.… I offer these pictures in the deep and sincere hope that these nightmare visions may never become a reality.
The drawing doesn’t capture anywhere near the reality, but it offers up two powerful national symbols, the Brandenburg Gate and German motherhood. The choice of the latter was an effective way to underline the indiscriminate nature of this kind of warfare while portraying the Germans as innocent victims.
Poster from an Antiwar, Lesbian, Feminist Fugitive, ca. 1970
Poster with a message by Susan Saxe, depicted in the drawing.1 Based on the text, the poster is probably from around 1970, when its author, a Brandeis senior and antiwar activist, went on the lam after robbing a bank and a National Guard Armory. On the FBI’s most wanted list, she was captured in 1975 and did seven years in prison.2 Her roommate, Katherine Ann Power, surrendered in 1980.3
Sometimes I hate my state: “NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates,” www.nhpr.org….
Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs
The pictures of Putin in Kursk wearing military garb instead of the suit we’ve been seeing him in lately were interesting. It’s almost as if he were taking his cue from Zelensky. Or putting on a show of manliness for his friend in the White House.🤣🇺🇦
A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.
Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.
Two Suffragettes
Images via Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92510578/ and https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005684835/.
The Kyiv Independent’s Anna Belokur packs a lot into one of the best comments I’ve seen about the Trump-Vance debacle during Zelensky’s visit this past Friday (Feb. 28). See the first eight minutes of “Ukraine this Week,” youtu.be…. 🇺🇦🇺🇸
📽️ “Conclave,” dir. Edward Berger (USA/UK, 2024), is one helluva good movie. Made differently, the same story could have yielded a drama, but here it is a thriller, driven by dialog, cinematography, and sound—with superb use of space, ceremony, and costumes.
📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.
Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.
Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.
📽️ I am really enjoying Irene Dunne in her old comedies, most recently “Lady in a Jam,” dir. Gregory La Cava (Universal, 1942). It involves a lost fortune and a psychiatrist too sure of his professional knowledge, which he posits has a kind of mathematical accuracy. Love, however, has other ideas.
Good piece: “The history and resurgence of The Transexual Menace” by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris, Gay City News, February 25, 2025, gaycitynews.com….🏳️⚧️🗽
“Theodora Goes Wild,” dir. Richard Boleslawski (Columbia Pictures, 1936) is great fun. It roasts performative morality, gossip, and small-mindedness. The main attraction, though, is Irene Dunne, who soon comes to handle it all with aplomb.
📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.
🏳️⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.
There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773