Peter S. Carmichael's "The War for the Common Soldier"

Peter S. Carmichael is Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, and reported the following:

Thankfully, page 99 intersects with some of the most important themes in my book. The page comes at the end of the chapter that explores how Civil War soldiers navigated the metaphysical confusion of war, when providential frameworks collapsed and men struggled to see divine will in a world immersed in violence. Soldiers quickly discovered that they could not rely on God absolutely and unconditionally if they hoped to survive in the ranks. Flexibility was essential. On both sides, men showed that they understood manhood, courage, emotions, and rules of conduct in highly malleable ways. They were not culturally hardwired by an unthinking code of militarized manliness as some historians have suggested.

Men on both sides turned pragmatic in their faith without surrendering to “modern doubt.” On page 99 I summarize the lives of four men who are showcased in the chapter, reminding the reader that “they all remained faithful and prayed fervently, and at the same time they also became more pragmatic in their reading of the world” as they transformed into veterans. Witnessing the suffering and sacrifices of fellow comrades imparted hard lessons about how to survive in the ranks.

At the end of page 99 I stress the importance of pragmatism to understanding how soldiers thought, and not just what they thought. Much of the existing scholarship gives ideology and identity an all-encompassing explanatory power to answer the important inquiry why men fought. I counter this ideological determinism by arguing that Civil War soldiers prized adaptability in thought and action. Ideas mattered, not so much for their intrinsic value, but for their effectiveness in getting the job done in the field. To survive and achieve military victory, Northern and Southern soldiers needed to shape themselves to the ground conditions of war. As I point out on page 99, the four soldiers in the chapter ---as well as throughout the book---“agreed that the war had upset the rules of life, and volunteers on both sides undoubtedly felt alienated from everything familiar at some point during their military careers.”

Northern and Southern soldiers came to put their trust in the practical knowledge gained in the field, given the difficulties in discerning God’s hand in the maelstrom of war. These four men endured many trials, both physical and philosophical, and still they persevered even as they were consumed by an ontological crisis. The concluding sentence concerning these four men page 99 perfectly captures a dominant theme in The War for the Common Soldier, when I write that “the erratic currents of idealism, even when drained dangerously low by a seemingly purposeless war, never left Northern or Southern soldiers standing on the barren ground of nihilism.”

Learn more about The War for the Common Soldier at Peter S. Carmichael's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben A. Minteer's "The Fall of the Wild"

Ben A. Minteer holds the Arizona Zoological Society Endowed Chair at Arizona State University, where he is a professor of environmental ethics and conservation in the School of Life Sciences. He has authored or edited many books, including The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America (2006) and The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation (2018).

Minteer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Fall of the Wild is mostly taken up by a single photograph. It’s one of the most depressing images in the history of wildlife conservation.

On the left side of the frame is a dead Tasmanian tiger (aka thylacine), a large, carnivorous marsupial with a distinctive striped back. The animal is strung up by its hind quarters with such a thin line that it almost seems to float in the frame. Seated and facing the animal on the right side of the image is the hunter who took the fatal shot, a man identified only as “Mr. Weaver.” A bearded, burly man with high cheekbones, he’s equipped with a rifle, a hunting coat, and a blank stare.

Thought to be taken in 1869, “Mr. Weaver Bags a Tiger” is one of the very few 19th century photographs of the thylacine known to history. The animal was persecuted by sheep farmers and bush hunters under private and government bounties in Australia’s rugged island state in the 19th century (even though the failure of the Tasmanian sheep industry owed more to human incompetence than to marauding marsupials). “Benjy,” the last of the species, died in a Tasmanian zoo in 1936.

In The Fall of the Wild, I discuss some of our more iconic lost animals that had the misfortune of either being highly attractive to rapacious market hunters and specimen collectors, or, like the thylacine, were viewed as threats requiring annihilation. I also mention some harrowing “close calls” where forward-thinking conservationists were able to pull species out of the fire, including the game-changing efforts to breed the American bison back into viability at the Bronx Zoo in the early 20th century and more recent struggles to make sure the southwestern skies are never free of California condors.

Elegiac cases like the thylacine and the passenger pigeon loom large in the morality tales of conservations. But so do happier examples like the bison and the condor. As a result, a powerful dynamic of loss-and-recovery has gripped generations of wildlife scientists and conservation advocates who worry about species slipping into the abyss, and who commit themselves to doing everything they can to save today’s imperiled wildlife from sharing the thylacine’s fate.

But this commitment to doing “whatever it takes” to save a species can end up threatening other values, concerns that have always been an important part of the conservation movement. Chief among them is a respect for a wild nature that isn’t completely under our thumb. Some of the more aggressive attempts to reverse the march of extinction today even go so far as to suggest that we should “revive” long-lost species like the thylacine and the passenger pigeon; a kind of “de-extinction” that signals the triumph of the engineering spirit in conservation. In The Fall of the Wild, I question whether de-extinction and other strongly interventionist approaches to wildlife conservation today are part of a sound environmental ethic – or whether they might keep us from learning a deeper lesson about the wisdom of humility, self-possession, and restraint in nature. It is a lesson that was clearly lost on Mr. Weaver back in 1869, but it’s also one that we, despite all our enlightened 21st century conservation attitudes and efforts, have yet to fully learn.

Visit Ben Minteer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Strausbaugh's "Victory City"

John Strausbaugh has been writing about the culture and history of New York City for a quarter of a century. City of Sedition, his singular history of New York City’s role in and during the Civil War, won the Fletcher Pratt Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2016; The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village, has been widely praised and was selected as one of Kirkus Review‘s best books of the year (2013). His books include Black Like You, a history of blackface minstrelsy; and E: Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith.

Strausbaugh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers during World War II, and reported the following:

Victory City is a composite portrait of New York City before, during, and after World War II, the period when the city was achieving its height of power and influence in the world, just as the world was falling apart all around it. I try to show that it was an immensely more complex, messy, turbulent place than we tend to see in the GI Joe and Rosie the Riveter nostalgia. It was also a city of gangsters and hookers and war profiteers. Of bobby soxers and juvenile delinquents. A city of more homegrown fascists and Nazis than it's comfortable to think about, and communists and anarchists as well. A city of spies and counterspies, isolationists and pacifists, patriots and traitors.

On page 99 I introduce one piece of that very large puzzle: the role that the city's trade unions played, especially in the garment district. Sidney Hillman, who ran the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, militantly leftist and pro-Soviet. Yet he was also one of Franklin Roosevelt's most faithful supporters in labor through the Depression and war years.

The war was a rough time for trade unions. Employers used the demands of wartime production as an excuse to roll back many of the gains unions won in the New Deal 1930s, and Roosevelt's government complied. There were more wildcat strikes and walk-outs during the war than in any other four-year period in American history. But as leader of the CIO, Hillman kept its two million workers voting for Roosevelt, and even started the first political action committee in American history, the CIO-PAC, to help ensure Roosevelt's re-election in 1944.

Roosevelt died in 1945, Hillman in 1946, and their combined impact on the labor movement has been debated ever since.

Visit John Strausbaugh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophia Rosenfeld's "Democracy and Truth: A Short History"

Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Common Sense: A Political History, which won the Mark Lynton History Prize.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Populism is, of course, much in the news these days. What it is not is an ideology or a fixed program. Rather, it is best described as a style or logic or, I’m going to suggest, narrative framework for conceptualizing and shaping political power that builds on the assumed opposition between two starkly defined camps. Typically, it begins with a (self-congratulatory) exaltation of the real people, the unjustifiably powerless. It adds a gripe about the past that often morphs into a full-blown conspiracy theory starring the unjustifiably powerful. It concludes with a fairytale-like denouement and new, mythic social role for its adherents. What is less noticed is how much it—like the Progressives’ arguments for the enhancement of expert guidance, which flourished at much the same moment in the late nineteenth century—depends upon a set of suppositions about how and whose truths to live by, or validated beliefs, are to be found in a real democracy. Only in this case, the solution involves rejecting ostensibly objective expertise and all the institutions, values, norms, procedures, and people that expertise goes with and valorizing a combination of quotidian experience and the feelings, impulses, beliefs, and institutions of ordinary people instead.

Page 99 of Democracy and Truth: A Short History actually gets at one of the central issues in the book: the longstanding tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd, on the one hand, and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts, on the other. Whereas technocrats and “epistocrats” threaten to ignore the former, populists reject the latter.

Learn more about Democracy and Truth at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Common Sense: A Political History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott L. Cummings's "Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port"

Scott L. Cummings is Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America's Port, and reported the following:

Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port is about the monumental effort by the labor and environmental movements—the blue and the green—to transform economic and environmental conditions at the massive and economically significant port complex in Los Angeles and Long Beach. At its core, the book is about how these social movements come together to make law regulating two of the ports’ most harmful externalities—air pollution and labor precarity. Their efforts and achievements teach important lessons about what it takes to win justice for disadvantaged workers and communities that form crucial links in the global supply chain.

Page 99 illuminates one-half of the book’s central focus—detailing the policy origins of the movement to “green” the ports. That page describes the genesis of what would become the cornerstone of a decade-long campaign to address a central cause of air pollution at the ports: the short-haul trucking industry. This is an industry is that is not widely known but forms the critical transit connection between the nearly one trillion dollars in cargo containers that move through the ports each year and their destinations—regional Amazon warehouses, retailers like Walmart and Target, and ultimately to customer doorsteps. The legal puzzle the book explores is how port truck drivers, once heavily unionized, became exploited low-wage workers, treated as independent contractors responsible for all the costs of operating expensive trucks. As a result of this treatment, drivers frequently earned less than the minimum wage and were unable to purchase and maintain low-emissions vehicles. They were both victims of labor abuse and the source of significant port pollution.

Page 99 discusses the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor commissions’ initial step to reduce air pollution—while winning the support of logistic industry players, particularly powerful retail shippers—through a comprehensive joint policy known as the Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP):

Both commissions were in a position to facilitate growth plans provided that they complied with environmental goals. It was ultimately the ports’ power to reject or delay expansion that provided the leverage needed to get industry buy-in. And although shippers and carriers had other ports they could use, those ports were generally not as attractive because of preexisting infrastructure investments in Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as access to the lucrative regional market. It was in this context that the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor commissions developed the outlines of CAAP….

This is a pivotal moment since it creates the essential political opportunity for a broader campaign to address the twin problems of air pollution and labor precarity in a comprehensive way. The rest of the book explores how this environmental mandate was transformed into a vehicle for challenging the drivers’ independent contractor status and the epic political and legal fight that ensued—one that ultimately winds through the United States Supreme Court and back to the front lines of port organizing, where there are now six labor contracts in an industry that previously had none in over forty years. How this occurred—and whether it can be sustained—has profound consequences for the future role of gig workers in the global economy.

Learn more about Blue and Green at the MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wilbur R. Miller's "A History of Private Policing in the United States"

Wilbur R. Miller is Professor of History at Stony Brook University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A History of Private Policing in the United States, and reported the following:

Opening A History of Private Policing in the United States to page 99, I find a discussion of the relationship between public law enforcement officials and private detectives during the 19th century. This discussion does point to a major argument of the book, that such cooperation is an important part of the development of private policing in the U.S. I have defined private policing very broadly to include not only the usual suspects of security guard services and private detectives (Pinkerton and Burns the most famous among many), but also control of labor unions and strikes, self-defense, vigilantism and private prisons. All these are forms of policing by private individuals to control the behavior of other people, with the tacit acceptance or open support of the state (government at all levels). Government has licensed and regulated security services and detectives, and sometimes hired them. It has in recent years broadened an individual’s ability to plead self-defense in a killing through the “stand your ground laws” in several states. It has sometimes passively, other times actively supported vigilante activity of many sorts: lynching, organized groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and ordinary neighborhood patrols. The army and police often worked with private strikebreaking agencies. The state contracts with private prison companies to manage prisoners and people detained under immigration laws. Of course, there have been conflicts between government and private agencies, especially between police and private detectives, but co-operation is an essential part of the story. This co-operation reflects the nature of the American government itself, a mix of public and private power in many areas. This inclusion of private agencies in governance reflects American political ideology, most apparent when Republicans dominate politically, that private is better than public, cheaper and more efficient. Sometimes that is true, but by no means always, especially in the case of private prisons. Guards protect property; detectives investigate, but private prisons make profit from people convicted under harsh minimum sentencing laws.

Learn more about A History of Private Policing in the United States at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Mangrum's "Land of Tomorrow"

Benjamin Mangrum is a fellow with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Mangrum applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 features the end of one subsection in the third chapter and the beginning of another. It’s a transitional moment, and I can’t say much for it as a stand-alone entry into the argument of Land of Tomorrow. The book’s aspiration is to unpack how trends in literary history help us better understand why American liberalism after WWII turned against parts of the reform agenda that characterized the New Deal during the 1930s. If you open up Land of Tomorrow without reading anything else and turn to page 99, you won’t see that wider argument, but you would see technical terms that I explain earlier in the book. In other words, it would probably be disorienting for readers to start on this page without reading anything else.

The context of this transitional moment is that I’m discussing why writers believed a literary style called “naturalism” (think Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser) suffered a “decline” in its cultural standing during the 1940s and 1950s. There were many reasons for this perceived decline, including the cultural fad of existentialism among the American elite and the spread of psychology and professional therapy. These are parts of the history of ideas I explain earlier in the chapter. However, on page 99, I suggest there may be other reasons that writers turned against the literary naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

For some writers, the deficits of naturalism were not so much its politics or deterministic logic as its marginalization of women of color. (99)

What follows this passage is a discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel Maud Martha (1953). You could say that this discussion beginning on page 99 contains a kind of self-criticism—that is, an acknowledgment of the limitations of this chapter’s argument. In other words, I am trying to acknowledge cultural work that doesn’t fit neatly into the map of American history that I’m offering in the book. Of course, I invite readers to judge for themselves whether the wider argument and such moments of self-criticism are successful. I hope this page at least gives readers a sense for the many moving parts in the argument, including parts that add further complexity to an already complex moment in American intellectual life.

Learn more about Land of Tomorrow at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shannon Withycombe's "Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America"

Shannon Withycombe is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:

Lost traces the miscarriage experiences of multiple women in nineteenth-century America, placing each one within the context of national reproductive policies, medical advances and authority, demographic and social changes, and personal desires and struggles. Throughout the book, I continually come back to the question: why did women begin to utilize the services of male doctors for help with miscarriage during the second half of the nineteenth century? There is nothing inherently “medical” about miscarriage, and American women had dealt with the experience for centuries with the help of female relatives and friends. This page gives some clues to why women did not seek out medical aid in the first half of the nineteenth century.

From page 99:

On January 2, 1852, Virginia physician P. Claiborne Gooch attended a thirty-year-old mother of three who had been “ailing and sore through the night.” Although she had continued her work the following day, even while suffering fatigue and dull pain in her lower body, she did not call on Gooch until the pains became “grinding and benumbing,” similar to labor pains. Gooch examined the woman and discovered her to be five to six months pregnant and passing a good deal of blood. Upon finding her cervix dilated, he determined the miscarriage would be unavoidable. In his report of this case in the Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal two months later, he wrote that upon this determination “I quietly took my bed-side seat till nature accomplished her duty – mine being merely to send the husband out of the room, and to inform the women that the accident must take place.” He continued to watch his patient, and later that night attempted to gently remove the mass once it had descended into her vagina, but when he found that such an action was impossible without a risk of violence, he “desisted, and waited till 10 o’clock on Nature.” Instead he gave her a solution of ergot, a fungus believed to induce and strengthen uterine contractions. Around midnight, the woman finally expelled the fetus, with little active aid from the doctor.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, American doctors began attempting to gain a foothold in the business of miscarriage. Viewing pregnancy loss not only as a space for potential profit, but also an avenue into the bigger business of childbirth, doctors tried to alter the meaning of miscarriage into more of a dangerous ailment, one that they were uniquely qualified to treat. However, when women did call upon them, like in the case above, doctors still had nothing new or exciting to offer them. Dr. Gooch had no special tool or medicine to prevent the miscarriage or speed it up, and instead sat patiently at the women’s bedside, waiting upon nature to take its course. This “expectant” treatment, as many critical physicians would refer to it later, did nothing to convince reproducing women and their families that doctors were any use in cases of miscarriage.

So what did shift popular sentiment? Why did more women by the end of the nineteenth century seek out medical men during miscarriages? Necessity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of women found themselves physically and socially separated from family, traditional healers, and familiar reproductive aid. Due to immigration, urbanization, and industrialization in late nineteenth-century America, women began utilizing the services of male physicians because they had nowhere else to turn. The rest of Lost explores the new world of late nineteenth century America and how social, legal, demographic, and economic changes shifted how many women dealt with miscarriage, and even what a miscarriage could mean.

Learn more about Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Cumyn's "North to Benjamin"

Alan Cumyn is the award-winning author of several wide-ranging and often wildly different novels. His historical novels The Sojourn and The Famished Lover chronicle the First World War and Great Depression experiences of artist Ramsay Crome. His human rights novels, Man of Bone and Burridge Unbound, follow a torture victim through survival and post-trauma. Losing It is a darkly funny and truly twisted novel about madness, while his Owen Skye books for kids–The Secret Life of Owen Skye, After Sylvia and Dear Sylvia— hilariously trace the calamitous trials of childhood and the pangs of early love. Cumyn’s young adult novel Tilt is a funny, sexy exploration of a teenaged boy’s obsessions as he lives through an impossibly absurd time of life. All Night, a literacy project, follows a young artsy couple through a stormy night of hard truths and romantic dreams. And Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend brings a touch of Kafka to the previously ordered love life of a high school senior who has no idea what might fly out of the primordial past. His latest novel, North to Benjamin, is a psychological thriller that sees a young boy, Edgar, dragged north by his unstable mother, testing his formidable survival skills.

Cumyn applied “Page 99 Test” to North to Benjamin and reported the following:

On page 99 of my new novel, North to Benjamin, young Edgar loses his regular speaking voice and begins barking like a dog. It's a pivotal moment. Edgar has been dragged north to the frontier town of Dawson City, Yukon by his unstable mother, Stephanie, who is looking for a new start after man problems in Toronto. They are housesitting and have little money, and Edgar, a quietly observant, deeply sensitive boy, has seen clearly that his mother is on the verge of embarking on yet another disastrous relationship, this time with a man who has befriended them but already has a long-time partner. Edgar has bonded with Benjamin, the old dog who came with the house, and in his anxious state has begun talking directly with Benjamin and nobody else.

In the kitchen, Edgar's mother loses patience with her eccentric son. "You could say something to me right now to indicate you know exactly what I'm telling you," she says. When all he manages is a quiet, "Woof-woof," she slams the table. "Talk! God damn you! Talk!" When he tries to write her a note – My throat feels bad – she sees right through him. "You're faking it!" she says near the end of the page.

By this point in the book it's well established that Edgar survives through his sensitivity, and through his ability to disappear, to escape notice. But the loss of his speaking voice, which coincides with his arrival at a new school, robs him of his usual survival strategies. Yet the bond with Benjamin is profound, and extends not only to some important conversations, but an unexpected ability on Edgar's part to smell with canine power, in effect to "read the news" of everything that is going on through the scents of those around him. So Edgar becomes sensitive in a different way, and the story turns in an unusual direction.

My wife and I were lucky enough to spend three months living in Dawson City, Yukon in the spring of 2014, at the Berton House residency, sponsored by the Writers' Trust of Canada. Dawson became famous as a gold rush town in 1898, and remains a delightful oddity – a vibrant small town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wilderness, and throbbing with stories. During my time there I was working on another novel, Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend, but stayed open to the story possibilities. It was only after we got back home that Edgar entered my imagination as a possible protagonist. The place itself, Dawson, where the Klondike River meets the Yukon River, and where cultures clashed when gold-crazed prospectors overran the local indigenous tribes, is almost like an extra character in the book. I'm not sure I've had a physical location affect me so profoundly for its rugged beauty, and for the openness and generosity of the people there. We would love to go back!

Visit Alan Cumyn's website.

Writers Read: Alan Cumyn.

My Book, The Movie: North to Benjamin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonja Thomas's "Privileged Minorities"

Sonja M. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colby College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India, and reported the following:

Privileged Minorities is a feminist examination of the intersections of race, caste, class, religion, and gender in postcolonial India. I specifically focus on the Syrian Christian community of Kerala, India. “Syrian” refers not to the country of Syria, but to the Syriac language and Eastern Christian traditions of the community. The Syrian Christians are also called “St. Thomas Christians” because they believe that St. Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus, came to Kerala in the year 52CE and converted Aryan Brahmins to Christianity. Their privileged caste status is buttressed by land ownership and class power. But as Christians, they are a minority religion in India and women in the community have to contend with the intersections of patriarchy and castesism (also known as brahmanical patriarchy).

Page 99 of Privileged Minorities sits in the middle of chapter four, “Who are the Minorities?” In this chapter, I examine differences between the Syrian Christians and other minorities through a minority rights protest that occurred in 1959. The Syrian Christians organized the protest claiming their rights under Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution were being violated by government regulations proposed in the 1957 Kerala Education Bill. Article 30(1) gives religious and linguistic minorities the right to administer and run their own schools. The purpose of this article is to ensure that minorities have an enclave where they can teach children about their minority culture and keep their minority way of life alive in the face of the dominant culture.

But what is “minority culture?”

On page 99 I state:

In all the discussion over minorities and the Kerala Education Bill, nothing is mentioned as to what is actually being protected by Article 30 (1)—only that the bill infringed upon this article. The Syrian Christian argument that minority schools were for the benefit of the minority community rested on the assumption that minority [school] managements are the authentic and legitimate authorities over what constitutes “minority culture.” The definition of “Christian culture” is evident in the concurrent debates over another bill, the [1958] Kerala Dowry Prohibition Bill. Syrian Christians asked for exemption from the Dowry Prohibition Bill on the basis of their customs enshrined in Christian personal law. As Anna Lindberg has argued, the codification of religious customs in the Christian personal law was an “identity making process” for the Syrian Christians, one in which patriarchal controls over women were strengthened. It is through the debates on this [Dowry Prohibition] Bill that we can see how gender roles and expectations act as the marker for defining minority culture rather than any numeric difference between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

In the late 1950s, Syrian Christian (male) politicians argued that the Syrian Christian community should be exempt from the reaches of the Dowry Prohibition Bill because dowry was their tradition. This “tradition” of dowry is an upper-caste Christian tradition that secured the community’s status in society over other minorities (Muslims, Dalit Christians, Tribals) and over Dalit Hindus. It secured the status of the community because the “tradition” of dowry mandated that Syrian Christian women needed to marry within the caste and within the faith. In turn, this ensured the literal reproduction of the caste, race, and class status of the community through endogamous unions.

This page really does reflect some of the major theoretical interventions of my book. Page 99 of Privileged Minorities looks at intersectional privilege and subordination, numerical minorities and assumptions concerning political vulnerability, and gendered and sexual controls which police bodies on everyday levels.

Learn more about Privileged Minorities at the University of Washington Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue