week8
Gendered grief and 'Gold Star Mothers'
Topic: In American wartime culture, dying and grieving have often appeared highly gendered phenomena, the province of men and women respectively (if not exclusively). In this week's seminar, we examine one particularly telling chapter in US postwar mourning and war memorialisation: the state-sponsored trips undertaken by 'Gold Star' mothers and widows to the graves of their fallen soldier sons and husbands in France during the early 1930s. Intended as a signal of the federal state's respect for men who made the ultimate sacrifice-- and the women who gave them up for the nation's wartime cause-- these pilgrimages proved deeply divisive, doing as much to open and aggravate wounds as to provide 'closure' for losses both personal and national.
Seminar questions:
- with what objectives in mind did the US government initiate the 'Gold Star' pilgrimages?
- did the pilgrimages attempt to instantiate a hierarchy of grief, with some losses considered more grievous and 'grievable' than others? If so, who sat where on the rungs of that hierarchy?
- why did the Gold Star pilgrimages become controversial-- to whom, and how?
- what does this particular historical episode suggest more generally about the relationship between private grief and larger projects of 'official' war memorialisation?
Required readings:
Primary source (read after the Clarke and Plant essay): James Weldon Johnson, 'Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,' https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/saint-peter-relates-incident-resurrection-day
Frances M Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, '"The Crowning Insult": Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,' Journal of American History 101, 4 (Sept. 2015), pp.406-32
Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (2012), ch. 3, 'The War Widows' Romance: Victory and Loss in the United States,' pp.53-89, e-book
Supplementary reading on WWI and Civil War mourning and memorialisation:
Associated Press, "Capital Rebuffs...", New York Times, May 30, 1930, p.12
On the ongoing 21st-century salience of segregated Gold Star pilgrimages:
Derek Hawkins, 'Insulting African American Gold Star Widows Has a History, Washington Post, 25 Oct. 2017
Lisa M Budreau, 'The Politics of Remembrance: The Gold Star Mothers' Pilgrimage and America's Fading Memory of the Great War,' Journal of Military History 72, 2 (2008), pp.371-411
W Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005) e-book
Joy Damousi, 'Gender and Mourning' in Susan R Grayzel and Tammy M Proctor, Gender and the Great War (2017), pp.211-29
Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying," Journal of Southern History 67, 1 (Feb. 2001), pp.3-38
Tracy Fisher, Burying America's War Dead (2019) e-book
Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (eds), Death in the American South (2015) e-book
Andrew Huebner, Love and Death in the Great War (2018)
Kimberly Lamay Licursi, Remembering World War I in America (2018) e-book
Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (2010), ch. 2, 'Mothers of the Nation: Patriotic Maternalism and Its Critics,' pp.55-85, e-book
Constance Potter, 'World War I Gold Star Mothers' Pilgrimages,' Parts 1 & II, Prologue (Summer 1999/Fall 1999)
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1999/summer/gold-star-mothers-1.html
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1999/fall/gold-star-mothers.html
Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (2018) e-book
Susan L Schrader, 'Anna Gilbertson and the Gold Star Mothers and Widows Pilgrimages after World War I,' Minnesota History 65, 5 (Spring 2017), pp. 164-77
Richard A Serrano, 'Poignant Protest,' Los Angeles Times Magazine, Sept. 15, 2002, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-sep-15-tm-moms37-story.html
Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury and Honor Our Military Fallen (2005)
Kate Sweeney, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning (2014) e-book
Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-41 (2010) e-book
Sarah M Wagner and Thomas Matyók, 'Monumental Change: The Shifting Politics of Obligation at the Tomb of the Unknowns,' History and Memory 30, 1 (Spring/Summer 2018), pp.40-74
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