This article examines the activism of three women of different generations—Emilia Rodríguez Sotero, Baldramina Sotero Cervoni, and Isabel Rosado Morales—in the movement for Puerto Rico's independence in the twentieth century to demonstrate the sheer breadth of some of the strategies undergirding that struggle. It uses oral history to reveal the otherwise unseen interactions and emotional support that extended across political generations of women in Puerto Rico. The article argues that women independence activists followed a dialogic practice that contributed to the movement's endurance. They spoke across political generations and looked to the biographies of women they knew well to style their own activism and navigate profound institutional and cultural barriers against independence organizing. Such intergenerational exchange defies an easy inheritance model and instead presents a genealogy of women's activism that was dialectical in bridging each generation's experiences at the intersection of political work and private life.
This article explores links that middle-class African American women drew between efforts to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment and the emergence of black Democrats in the 1928 American presidential election. Because of their longstanding interest in civil rights and temperance, middle-class black Republican women were uniquely positioned to make connections between phenomena that historians have typically analyzed separately, the repeal movement and the early stages of the voting realignment. They argued that Democratic success in repealing the Eighteenth Amendment would set a precedent for eliminating the Reconstruction Amendments. They also identified black opposition to prohibition as threatening to racial uplift ideology, a class-based anti-racist strategy that, among other proscriptions, demanded abstention from liquor. Black Republican women's decision to invoke this declining ideology and blend it with their constitutional observation undercut not only the broad appeal of their constitutional argument, but also their claims to represent African Americans in party politics.
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