Personal Occupations: Women's Responses to U.S. Military Occupations in Latin America

McPherson, Alan

doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.2010.00271.x

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…has observed, 'Anti-occupation activists noted hundreds of times that US Marines raped and harassed women'. 3 In the past, few historians would have noted anything novel about this claim. In the words of Pamela DeLargy, for centuries, sexual violence in warfare was 'treated as an unfortunate but inevitable phenomenon, not worthy of much attention'.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism, Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

Wright¹

2016

Gender & History

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This article explains the disparity between the United States (US) military government's efforts to defend and empower local women during the first occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and its reputation for tolerating sexual assault. It argues that US officials, inspired by a progressive ideology that linked the social, economic and political spheres, set out to reshape Dominican sexual and gender norms as a means to ensure political stability. Yet, these efforts fell victim to both Dominican and US Marines’ conceptions of gender and normative sexuality. Building upon a thriving body of scholarship that addresses the significance of US efforts to redefine Dominican gender norms, this article analyses the military government's policies towards women and provost courts’ responses to sexual assault. It concludes that, combined with an aggressive anti‐prostitution campaign, the military government's reforms succeeded only in creating an atmosphere favourable to crimes against women. Moreover, rape and the way it was prosecuted revitalised the patriarchal norms that US officials had set out to transform, thus setting the stage for the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whose thirty‐year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women. Thus, US policies and attitudes not only ensured the failure of progressive reform but also contributed to the ongoing subjugation of the very women the military government had pledged to empower.

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confidence: 99%

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism, Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

Wright¹

2016

Gender & History

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Domestic Workers and Foreign Occupation: Haitian Servants, US Marines, and Conflicts over Labor and Empire in Haiti, 1915–1934

Casey

2019

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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During the US military occupation of Haiti, domestic workers performed the crucial labor that allowed Marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the entire country to function. In this sense, they represented a human infrastructure for the entire occupation. Their experiences show that the debates over labor, race, and sovereignty that defined the high politics of the occupation actually reached into private spaces where face-to-face interactions between occupier and occupied occurred. Domestic work, like other types of labor in the occupation, ran the gamut from highly coerced forms of unpaid child labor and convict work to various configurations of wage labor. Domestic sites influenced mutual processes of race-making, including the US exoticist obsession with Haitian Vodou. Servants’ conflicts with their Marine employers included—but ultimately went beyond—daily struggles over labor. Their proximity to marines influenced domestics’ participation in acts of anti-imperial activism, such as the Caco rebellion, and explains why servants were invoked by radical journalists and cultural nationalist writers who opposed US rule. Domestics’ activities also highlight under-explored areas of Haitian activism, such as their use of formal state institutions to seek redress and their participation in emerging forms of urban protest that included other members of the urban working class. Although novel and relatively small during the occupation, such urban protests have become a staple of Haitian politics in the present day.

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Occupied Thoroughfares: Haitian Women, Public Space, and the United States Occupation, 1915–1924

Johnson

2017

Caribbean Military Encounters

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Personal Occupations: Women's Responses to U.S. Military Occupations in Latin America

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism, Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism, Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

Domestic Workers and Foreign Occupation: Haitian Servants, US Marines, and Conflicts over Labor and Empire in Haiti, 1915–1934

Occupied Thoroughfares: Haitian Women, Public Space, and the United States Occupation, 1915–1924

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