Highlights from this issue...

Landscape artists
Art / Women / California, 1950-2000: Parallels and Intersections edited by Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press/San Jose Museum of Art, 2002, 388 pp., $65.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Elizabeth West Hutchinson

 

Thelma Johnson Streat, Rabbit Man, 1941. Gouache and ink on cardboard, 6-5/8 x 4-7/8 in. From Art / Women / California.

THE MYTHS OF CALIFORNIA have always been strongly visual. Spanish explorers created artistic representations of Califias even before they began charting the northern Pacific coastal region that became identified with that paradisiacal land. The state's more recent association with the entertainment and high-tech industries has solidified its links to the pleasures and possibilities of seeing. Perhaps it is because of this tradition that California became such a powerful location for women of diverse backgrounds who have used art to make their experiences, identities and values visible.

Art/Women/California, the companion to an exhibition of the same name on view at the San Jose Museum of Art until November 3rd, takes on the challenge of mapping the diverse contributions of women artists working in California in the past fifty years. It casts a wide net, incorporating the work of women of different ethnic and class backgrounds as they explore a variety of media. The editors and curators, Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni, carefully avoid collapsing the distinctions between artists from different regions or periods or social positions. At the same time, they identify a set of concerns running throughout the work, including an anti-modernist emphasis on content over form, especially content geared toward the exploration of identity, and an interest in using art to intervene in society.

Less an exhibition catalogue than a survey, the book has the strengths and weaknesses of this genre: it is both too much to digest in one reading and too superficial in its coverage of individual artists and works. Yet it serves as a valuable introduction, especially to artists with careers on the margins of the mainstream art world--such as the Chicano collective Las Mujeres Muralistas, Tsalagi (Cherokee)/Euro-American weaver Kim Shuck and Japanese American painter and sculptor Ruth Asawa, whose career included both art-making and educational reform. They appear on these pages alongside better-known pioneers in the fields of feminist art (Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Eleanor Antin), performance art (Suzanne Lacy, Ann Hamilton, Linda Montano, Nao Bustamante), environmental artists (Bonnie Sherk, Helen Harrison, Reiko Goto), filmmakers and new media artists (Lynn Hershman Leesen, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Julie Dash), artists who have explored African American visual and cultural traditions (Betye Saar, Samella Lewis, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems) and many others. The twenty contributors to the catalogue are no less prestigious: they include cultural critics who have been working in California for several decades and young voices helping define the role of gender in the aesthetic debates of the future.

Fuller and Salvioni interpret the identity of a Californian somewhat broadly to encompass lifelong residents, artists who spend part of the year in California and those who reside elsewhere but created major works there. This flexibility fits the increasing mobility and globalization of the period covered. One of the editors' primary goals is to connect the art produced by women in California with the social and political changes of the post-World War Two era. The history relayed on these pages takes the reader beyond an East Coast fantasy of Hollywood to retrace (among other things) the dispossession of peoples from the land effected by first Spanish and then American colonial expansion, the impact of immigration and citizenship legislation on Mexican and Asian laborers, the forced relocation of Native Americans to San Francisco as part of the government's assimilationist Indian policies, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two and Oakland's Black Panther movement. Many of the artists featured were involved in the Civil Rights, labor, anti-war and feminist movements originating in California; others have used themes from regional history to explore contemporary ideas of identity and community. Angela Davis argues that this history might also allow us to "imagine and strive for new social and psychic landscapes [that] redefine the promise of California."

Sylvia Lark, Jokhang 1, 1983. Oil on canvas, 48 x 6 in. From Art / Women / California.

ART/WOMEN/CALIFORNIA uses ethnicity as its primary organizational framework and handles sexuality, class and, to a limited extent, spirituality, within the essays. This no doubt reflects the key role that dialogues and conflicts about ethnicity have played in the feminist movement. Performance artist and writer Suzanne Lacy acknowledges the contradictions involved in creating inter-ethnic dialogue, and the persistence of many core feminist challenges: "Ironically, the contradictions of this decade are no more or less than those of the '70s: interracial collaboration is inherently problematic/oppressive; the Left has difficulty understanding art that does not 'look' like traditional modes of resistance; critical discourse in the fine arts continually lags behind that of cultural politics; and educational preparation for community art is insufficiently rigorous."

The introductory "Cultural Overview" includes essays by the prominent Euro-American feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick and the African American cultural critic Angela Davis. The second section--"Parallels"--offers historical overviews of African American, Asian American, European American, Chicano/Latino and Indigenous art. Significant as these diverse histories are, what emerges most strongly from this section and the one that follows ("Intersections: Ley Lines" is also organized along ethnic divisions) is how California has historically situated members of different groups in relationship to one another. In a discussion of Thelma Johnson Streat, a black dancer and artist who traveled extensively in the Americas and across the Pacific and integrated her ethnographic research into her creative work, Judith Wilson argues that Streat had "an understanding of African American identity as congruent with a Pacific Rim multicultural outlook." We might productively compare Streat's art with that of the Seneca painter Sylvia Lark, whose travels to Tibet inspired work that speaks powerfully, if abstractly, about creating connections between indigenous peoples from diverse areas, or with the contemporary installations of May Sun, which invite a comparison between the experiences of Mexican American, Japanese American, Filipino American and Chinese American agricultural workers.

The multi-ethnic background of many of the artists included in Art/Women/California, such as Betye Saar, Yolanda Lopez and Arlene Bowman, reminds us of the (sometimes violent) cultural mixing in California's history and confirms that identity itself is cultural, not biological. Many of the essays challenge ethnic and gender essentialism. Karin Higa's essay, "What is an Asian American Woman Artist?" argues that the very idea of a cohesive Asian American identity is vexed. I found Jolene Rickard's description of indigenous people in California as "diasporic" particularly useful; it made me realize that migration of one kind or another might be another connecting theme for the women included here.

In the last section--"Intersections: Themes and Practices"--the writers bring together artists of diverse backgrounds whose work investigates similar problems. Several of these essays explore the notion of space. Jennifer Gonzales and Pamela Lee both play with this idea, thinking about artists seeking a place from which to speak, inserting their bodies into space and, importantly, using one's artistic work to influence the use of space in a state overwhelmed by urban growth and environmental devastation. Moving fluidly from Amalia Mesa-Bains' and Catherine Opie's gallery work to Bonnie Sherk's utopian community and Helen and Newton Harrison's plans for environmental urban reform, Gonzales argues that California women artists "reveal a new conceptual and historical terrain. What the artists have unearthed is the state of California itself--its fragments of earth, its immigration history, its populations, its biographies, its ecological habitats."

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Mixed-media assemblage, 11-3/4 x 8 x 2-3/4 in. From Art / Women / California.

This section also offers a useful overview of women artists' engagement with photography, film and digital technology. The rich array of artists in these chapters indicates women's strong attraction to new media's ability to challenge art history's formal and cultural conventions. Many of the videos, digital constructions and installations discussed explore current events, social strategies of surveillance and biological notions of ethnic and gender identity. Others use technology to create feminized spaces in both the physical and the virtual world.

Like all collaborations on this scale, the book has some frustrating elements. My leading complaint is the lack of illustrations of works by artists discussed repeatedly in the book and of illustration of works by artists other than the ones analyzed in the essays. This problem is compounded by the lack of a bibliography: readers who want to find out more about an artist--or a critic or teacher--are on their own. Some of the book's problems are inevitable, given the need to work within categories even as we challenge their validity. One example of this is Fuller and Salvioni's insistence on selecting only artists "who reference their work to an art context." This appears to mean those working in studio traditions, eliminating the many applied artists and craftspeople whose work challenges traditional divisions of "high" and "low" in ways many feminists would embrace. I also felt the book would have benefited from a more extensive exploration of artists from recent immigrant groups, from Southeast and South Asia, the Pacific and Central and South America.

The evolving feminist movement is an essential framework for this book--from the consciousness-raising groups, art projects and institutional critiques created by women in the 1960s and 1970s to the more diffuse results of feminist ideas in the education, exhibition and criticism of art in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors are careful to distinguish between women artists, even those who questioned gender roles, and artists who self-identify as feminists. They remind us that many artists of color felt alienated by mainstream feminism, while others felt that the struggles within their communities were simply more urgent. At the same time, the book's inclusive, dialogic nature demonstrates a commitment to feminist principles such as collaboration, resistance to authority and the need to bear witness to the struggles and accomplishments of the past. The editorial voice that comes through argues, sometimes anxiously, for the continuing relevance of these themes.

What emerges as perhaps the most powerful legacy of this movement is its record of mentoring and community-building, ranging from the creation of innovative spaces to work and exhibit, including Womanhouse and Galeria de la Raza, to the establishment of innovative educational programs. It includes California women's dedication to documenting and writing about each others' work in books and journals. And it includes the effort to create permanent records of African American, Asian American and Chicano/Latino art history in new museums in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hopefully Art/Women/California documents only the first fifty years of this tradition.

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The high cost of progress
Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. New York: Doubleday, 2002, 390 pp., $27.50 hardcover.

Reviewed by Alice Kessler-Harris

A WIDELY USED GUIDE to employment discrimination contains four paragraphs on sexual harassment and only one on the particular form of harassment known as a "hostile environment." "Unwelcomed caresses, obscene comments and the like can make a woman's working conditions unbearable...." writes author Michael Evan Gold. Such behavior is illegal. But what does it take to prove it exists?

The judicial decisions that hold a company liable if it tolerates hostile conditions are of astonishingly recent vintage. The idea of a hostile work environment was first floated by Catharine MacKinnon in 1979. In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission issued guidelines incorporating the notion. And in 1986, in the landmark case of Meritor Savings Bank v Vinson, the Supreme Court decided that sex discrimination could be based on a hostile work environment. A company, it decreed, could be held liable if it had not adopted and implemented an anti-sexual harassment policy. But all of these cases were based on the complaint of a single individual, and the remedy was to provide damages to the person who brought suit. Not until 1991 did a federal district court establish that women were entitled to sue as a class, making all female employees eligible for damages if a company was found guilty of tolerating a hostile work environment. That case, Jenson v Eveleth Mines, is the subject of this book.

If you have ever wanted to understand the painstaking way that law develops on the backs of individuals; if you have ever been curious about the human cost of legal progress--this is the book to read. Told in riveting detail, Class Action is simultaneously the story of a single gutsy woman and of the men who daily tormented and taunted her and her female colleagues. It reads like a detective story in which the central question is whether women like Lois Jenson will win the right to work at jobs that men have long considered their own. The authors, a lawyer and a journalist, never let us forget that the larger issues involved affect every working man and woman. But by unsentimentally and directly focusing on the life of a single protagonist and her struggle for reasonable working conditions, they bring the story home.

JENSON TOOK A JOB at the iron ore mine in Eveleth, Minnesota, because it paid about three times as much as she could earn anywhere else. A 27-year-old single mother who had been forced by poverty to put up her second child for adoption, she still had a small son to support. On the Mesabi iron range where she lived, most jobs available to women paid less than it cost to cover the rent. Her female colleagues at the mine were also drawn there by the wages. Most were family bread-winners; many had small children; a handful were single women. In March 1975, Lois was one of four women who went to work at the Eveleth mines, which had never before employed a woman other than in a typical pink-collar job. But they, and the United Steel Workers of America, had just agreed to a consent decree that reserved twenty percent of the new jobs in the iron and steel industry to women and minorities. Lois was in the vanguard of what looked like a sea change.

From the beginning, the men felt their jobs threatened by the influx of women. They were angry about having them around and uncomfortable in their presence. On the second day on the job, Lois heard a refrain she and others would soon learn to ignore. "You fucking women don't belong here. If you knew what was good for you, you'd go home where you belong." Initial grumbling about having to clean up their language quickly gave way to the attitude that if women couldn't take it, they ought not to be there. Many of the men exhibited an aggressive sexuality, an "in your face" anger that they claimed was simply teasing or having fun, but that most of the women experienced as shameful, humiliating and hostile. Foul language and incessant questions about their sex lives confronted all the women. Accusatory graffiti, posters and photos of naked or half-naked women, some with penises drawn in appropriate places, littered the plant, including the foremen's offices. Dildos modeled out of waterproofing material appeared in the women's work-places or taped to light bulbs. Men groped and touched on the flimsiest excuse or none.

Women who complained found themselves threatened with rape or sent to work in lonely parts of the plant where they felt vulnerable; one woman was forced to work with a man who dropped his pants when he was alone with her. Many parts of the plant lacked women's restrooms; others lacked facilities of any kind, and while the men relieved themselves against the walls, women stopped drinking and held their urine in for hours at a time. Dehydration and severe bladder and kidney infections followed. One male worker invaded the women's locker room and ejaculated on the clothing of a woman who had rejected his advances--not once but three times, before she had the courage to report him. Another slit the pants of a woman who refused him. Lois came to work the night after she had slept for the first time with a co-worker, only to discover that the news was all over the plant. Her partner chose to demonstrate his ownership by grabbing her crotch with a black-grease-smeared palm that left his hand print on her jeans; a chorus of laughter from the men surrounding her revealed that she had been set up.

But these men were union brothers, and this, according to their leaders, was merely their culture. Mean-spirited and hostile as they were, Lois could not publicly accuse them of making her life miserable without challenging the union ethos of fraternity. She was caught between union and management. Reliant on the union for protection, eager not to offend by turning a brother in to the bosses, Lois begged union officials to act, only to discover that they were men too and that the male culture transcended class lines. When she suggested a women's committee, and an open discussion of the problem, the one female union representative (a strong woman who later changed her mind and became a staunch ally) downplayed the possibility of a solution and suggested that Lois try harder to "get along."

With nowhere to turn, all the women learned to cope with this behavior in their own ways. Some gave as good as they got; one or two carried concealed knives with them to work; others retreated into sobs, or took sick days to recover from attacks. Silently, they gained and lost weight under pressure, endured sleeplessness, fear and anxiety, turned inward and learned to stifle their feelings. Only when the men became dangerous did women complain. The final straw for Lois came when she was stalked by an unstable salaried worker who invaded her home and threatened her son: the union still refused to go to bat and a management-promised transfer did not materialize. Lois filed her first formal complaint with the State Department of Human Rights in October of 1984.

TWO AND A HALF YEARS of escalating harassment later, a lawyer from the Attorney General's office contacted her to begin proceedings. During the next seven years, Lois was persuaded to turn her individual complaint into a class action. She identified and hired a private law firm to pursue the case; persuaded several women to join her at the cost of alienating most of the other women workers and the union she had fought so hard to protect; and finally won the right to have the case treated as a class action.

This was only the beginning of a process that was to leave Lois and the two other women who became the major plaintiffs in the case alternately exhausted, isolated and desperate. Fearful of retaliation and persuaded that the union might suffer irreparable financial damage, most of the women workers would not join them in the law suit. The rumour quickly spread that Lois and her friends were in it for the money and that a settlement would threaten the future of the company and the jobs of thousands of iron workers. And when the union (out of legal necessity) became a party to the suit, union leaders spread the lie that a settlement would bankrupt the company, and joined with managers in a successful alliance to persuade a handful of women workers to sign a petition testifying that they had never been subjected to harassment.

The story of how the law suit wended its way through trial and the ripple effect on the lives of the lead plaintiffs is filled with pyrrhic victories and heartbreaking defeats. Lois located a remarkable team of committed and able lawyers whose devotion to the principles at stake led them to take on the case and carry it through to the end at a cost of nearly six million dollars. But the long, tortuous struggle had a devastating effect on the lives of all the plaintiffs, and especially on Lois. Kathy Anderson, a once feisty pit worker, collapsed under the stress and retreated into silence. Lois' main ally, a former union leader named Pat Kosmach, developed ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and died before the case ended. Though her death cannot be blamed on the lawsuit, the gruesome scene in which the company's attorneys invaded her hospital room, demanding to see her medical records and seeking to depose a woman who could no longer speak, illustrates the ruthlessness with which the company sought to avoid paying damages.

And Lois slowly succumbed. Early on she had learned, through therapy, not to blame herself for the aggression levelled at her. A woman of sharp memory and courageous determination, she had saved harassing letters, taken photographs of graffiti, and kept a diary with her responses to events and her feelings about herself and her lawyers. As the trials began, she turned to medication to calm her nerves and help her sleep. The endless waiting, the rollercoaster of hope shattered by negative decisions, the brutal exposure of her most intimate and painful youthful experiences, drove her into paranoia and depression, until she could no longer face the workplace and was forced onto disability leave. Pills and more pills altered her once lithe body, blotched her skin and clouded her mind. By the end of the trial, the woman who had once been eloquent in her own defense and had picture-perfect recall slurred her words and contradicted herself on facts she had recited a dozen times before. Such is the human cost of our legal victories.

Not until 1992 did the case go to trial on the issue of whether the company had tolerated a hostile work environment. When, a year later, the decision came down unequivocally in favor of the women, they had to go back to court to seek damages, a process that required all of them to testify again. This--by now the third proceeding in which they had been called--began in January of 1995. Because the strategy of the company's lawyers was to claim they had histories of emotional disturbance, each woman was subjected to vicious cross-examination in which every aspect of her emotional life was explored. It ended in travesty when the judge decided that each woman's emotional trauma stemmed from prior condition, not from workplace harassment. The plaintiffs appealed successfully, garnering a blistering decision that ordered a quick second trial for damages, this one before a jury. But by now the women were ill, exhausted, bitter and resentful. Unable to face another trial, they agreed, one by one, to individual settlements. The case came to an end on New Year's Eve 1997, thirteen years after Lois brought her original complaint.

The case of Jenson v. Eveleth Mines made important law in two respects: it established that women could sue as a class for sexual harassment, and it placed the burden of proof on the company, not the victim, to show that where a hostile environment was found to exist, it did not damage individual women.

There are no simple victories: in the end, Lois Jenson and her colleagues settled for relatively modest amounts of financial compensation. Lois never got the apology she wanted from the company, and she, Kathy Anderson and others will bear the emotional scars of their ordeal for as long as they live. One day the history of feminism will be rewritten to honor individuals like Lois Jenson who struggled for so many years and at great cost to force companies to create workable sexual harassment policy. Until then, we have the authors of this wonderful book to thank for bringing this inspiring story to life.

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Restoring a reputation
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. New York: HarperCollins, 2002, 380 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Carolyn Cohen

Rosalind Franklin Photo © The Novartis Foundation

THE PRACTICE OF SCIENCE becomes high drama in Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Brenda Maddox presents a compelling analysis of the duplicity behind the design of a remarkable model for the structure of DNA--the substance of the gene. Maddox's book is an understated yet moving account of the life of Rosalind Franklin. But our interest surely is based on Franklin's critical role in the solution of the DNA structure and her subsequent betrayal by those two antiheroes, James Watson and Francis Crick.

Knowing something of the work of Franklin's predecessors is essential to understand the controversies surrounding her role. Atomic structures for the three-dimensional folding of large biological molecules are commonplace today; they are largely derived from the use of X-ray crystallography--a physical method for structure analysis developed in England at the turn of the twentieth century by Sir William Bragg and his son Lawrence. Over the past decades, this technique has become very powerful, with improvements in computerized methods for structure determination and in the intensity of sources of radiation. By 1950, however, no protein structure had yet been solved, and this goal was considered to be the key to the secret of life--because proteins (consisting of polymers of amino acids) make up the machinery of cells. But others believed that the secret of life lay in the machinery of heredity, and the locus of heredity--the nucleus of the cell--also contained large amounts of a polymer called DNA. Only after 1943, when Oswald Avery and his collaborators at the Rockefeller Institute in New York demonstrated that the specificity of heredity resided in DNA and not in protein, did most scientists become what Jim Watson (in the film version of this story) is said to have called "The Believers": those who recognized that DNA was the key molecule of this aspect of the secret of life.

The British school that came to be termed "molecular biology," led by W. T. Astbury and J. D. Bernal in the 1930s and 1940s, sought for the most part to solve the structures of proteins: their focus was on conformation (or three-dimensional folding) as the key to function. But after World War Two, physicists and geneticists who had been inspired by Erwin Schrodinger's book, What is Life?, led by Max Delbruck at the California Institute of Technology, formed the so-called "phage group." Its central focus was to decipher the physical basis of the transmission of biological information-conceived of as the "secret of the gene." As John Kendrew has pointed out, these two schools of molecular biology--the Conformational and the Informational--came together in solving the puzzle of the structure of DNA.

The first protein structure was solved in 1951, not by the British but by an American, Linus Pauling--renowned as the great guru of chemistry at CalTech. Using poor X-ray diffraction diagrams of fibrous proteins (such as hair or muscle), together with the results of crystal structure analysis of small peptides, he conceived of a stable helical model for these fibrous substances. It was named the "alpha helix" because Astbury had earlier classified the characteristic X-ray diagram of such proteins as the "alpha pattern." Pauling's discovery seemed almost miraculous, because he appeared to use a minimum of experimental data.

Later, when the first globular proteins were finally solved by X-ray crystallography, they revealed that the alpha helix was, in fact, a widespread motif in the folding of many proteins. But as groundbreaking as the discovery of the alpha helix was, this structure did not immediately reveal how proteins function. Indeed, in the decades since then only a limited number of protein structures have readily yielded this information by inspection.

 

A schematic illustration of the double helix. The two sugar- phosphate backbones twist about on the outside with the flat hydrogen-bonded base pairs forming the core. Seen this way, the structure resem- bles a spiral staircase with the base pairs forming the steps. From The Double Helix.

THE DETERMINATION OF THE STRUCTURE of DNA was due to four principal figures: James Watson and Francis Crick, who were working together in Cambridge, England, and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who were certainly not working together at King's College in London. Without a doubt, Rosalind Franklin's early death at 37 influenced subsequent versions of the story. She has been seen as a victim--because she could not tell us the facts as she knew them--and as a heroine--because of the information that has come to light about her part in the research. Many view her simply as a good scientist who came in second in an intellectual race.

The story Maddox tells about the young Rosalind's family and upbringing gives us a number of clues to the person she would become. She portrays Franklin as complex, strong-minded and adventurous, capable of great generosity yet uncompromising in her judgment of people, and a perfectionist in all her undertakings. She was an "alarmingly clever" young woman from a prosperous and cultured Anglo-Jewish banking family. As Maddox explains, assimilated Jewish families like the Franklins were often "more English than the English," by preference, perhaps, but also to avoid anti-Semitism; they adhered to a strict code of philanthropy, good works and undemonstrative behavior. Rosalind developed an early passion for science--especially chemistry and physics--and defended this choice from the doubts of her father; she became one of the few women in the family to take up a career.

After receiving her degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, with a Ph.D. on the study of various forms of coals and carbon, Rosalind spent four happy years working in a laboratory in Paris, where she learned how to do X-ray diffraction of these difficult materials. Her work made her an authority in this field and prepared the foundation for her future work on biological structures. In 1950, while still in Paris, she was applying for jobs back in the UK and received a fateful letter from John Randall, the Director of the Biophysics Laboratory at King's College. Randall and Maurice Wilkins, the deputy director of the unit, had decided to recruit Franklin to expedite the research Wilkins was conducting on the structure of DNA. Randall's letter to Franklin confirmed her appointment and explained that she was to take charge of the X-ray work on DNA, with a graduate student to help her. Here, however, Randall played what turned out to be a sinister role: Wilkins was not informed of the contents of this letter and had assumed that Franklin (however expert) would be helping him.

In a public lecture given at the Royal Society in 1999, Franklin's last and most celebrated collaborator, Aaron Klug, recalled that when she began work at King's College, Franklin transformed the field in one year. By all accounts, she did this independently of Wilkins, for whom she had little respect. Klug stressed that Franklin was a remarkably skilled experimentalist who was gifted analytically as well. She showed that DNA produced two very different kinds of X-ray patterns. The so-called "A" pattern, obtained at low humidity, was crystalline and had discrete spots. At higher humidity, that orderly arrangement was seen to break up (because water separates the molecules), and a new, rather simpler "B" pattern, with fewer and more diffuse spots, appeared. Earlier workers had been misled by X-ray photographs of DNA that contained a mixture of these two forms.

These two "A" and "B" patterns suggested two different paths to the solution of the structure. To Franklin, this presented a difficult choice. She knew that she could tackle the "B" form, which, from the X-ray diagram, was likely to be helical, but it appears that she thought that the model building required was too subjective an approach to be reliable. Instead, and quite characteristically, she chose to tackle the more crystalline "A" form, although this would require much computational effort, because she wanted a more definitive solution. This was an unfortunate choice. She worked chiefly on the "A" form for about two years, but by February 1953 she had to acknowledge that this was proving too difficult to interpret. Turning her full attention to the "B" form, she moved quickly. Sadly, however, as Aaron Klug has stressed, she had no collaborator--or, as someone once ironically said, "Watson was her only collaborator."

Who was James Watson? Trained in genetics, Watson was happily ignorant of math, physics, or chemistry. Having seen Maurice Wilkins' early X-ray patterns of DNA, he went to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to learn methods of structure analysis. There he began a magical collaboration with Francis Crick, who was a physicist-turned-crystallographer and an old friend of Wilkins. Together, Watson and Crick aspired to solve the structure of DNA by model building, just as Pauling had done for the alpha helix in proteins.

In 1951, shortly after coming to the Cavendish, Watson attended a talk by Rosalind Franklin in which she described her first year's work at King's. From this lecture, he brought considerable misinformation back to Crick, and they constructed a wrong, essentially "inside-out" model of DNA. Franklin discredited this model on sight, and soon both Watson and Crick were told to stop working on DNA because it was regarded as a King's College project. About fifteen months later, however, they saw a manuscript of Pauling's on a model of the DNA structure (which was even worse than their own) and, to paraphrase Maddox, Watson and Crick were unleashed again.

As told in many versions of the story, Watson then went to King's College to speak with Crick's old friend, Maurice Wilkins, about Pauling's manuscript. (Wilkins had kept Crick informed of Franklin's work and of his unhappy relations with her.) There, Wilkins showed Watson the best X-ray pattern of the "B" form of DNA that Rosalind Franklin had obtained and gave him some of the dimensions for the possible structure--all without Franklin's knowledge. Using her data, Watson and Crick resumed their model building. Soon, thanks to a colleague at Cambridge, they also gained access to a report of Franklin's work for the previous two years; based on this information, they were able to build the outside (or "backbone") of what turned out to be a double helical model. Thus, largely thanks to Franklin's work and with Crick's special expertise in how helices diffract X-rays, they solved this part of the puzzle.

The more difficult question remained: how the so-called "bases" (large, flat structures) fit into the center of the double helix. Here, after earlier attempts and with the great good luck of advice from the chemist J. Donohue, who had worked in Pauling's laboratory, Watson was able to discover the way in which a larger base on one chain could bond with a smaller one on the other chain in a very specific way. The "secret of life" was solved.

MEANWHILE, WORKING ON THE "B" PATTERN and almost entirely alone, Rosalind Franklin had decided on the two-chain structure. (She missed the evidence in her own data that the two chains ran in opposite directions.) By March 17th, 1953, after she had left King's and moved to Birkbeck College, she finished writing a note for publication on the "B" form. But it was too late. One day later, a draft of Watson and Crick's paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," reached her. She and her student published their note on the "B" form in the April 25th, 1953 issue of Nature, which also included the papers of Watson and Crick on their model and of Wilkins and his colleagues on their own work. Franklin's note was now seen simply as confirmatory evidence for the correctness of their structure.

Watson and Crick's paper, less than two pages long, rightly became famous. In its conclusion, they added the following sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." It described (not quite accurately, as we shall see) the discovery of a most beautiful and significant structure whose unique role in biological function was revealed simply by inspection.

Would Rosalind Franklin have made this discovery very soon if Watson and Crick--using her data--had not? Aaron Klug addressed this question well in his 1999 Royal Society talk. Reviewing her notebooks and reports, which had been given to him after her death, both he and Francis Crick became convinced that she was poignantly close. Crick has estimated elsewhere that it might have taken her from three weeks to three months to solve the structure (although he has said different things at different times on this point).

What happened later? Over the next years, Wilkins and colleagues filled in the details of the DNA structure. Franklin was joined by Klug and a group of young people at Birkbeck College, and did brilliant work on the helical structure of tobacco mosaic virus. At this time, she was enjoying her life in science to the fullest. She died of ovarian cancer at a tragically young age, 37, in 1958, working until the very end. Crick, Watson and Wilkins were given the Nobel Prize in 1962. This prize is never given to four people and not posthumously.

Why all the fuss? Because of the book that Watson published in 1968, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA, which revealed a number of unknown facts about the discovery process. The most startling of these was that he and Crick had not relied purely on model building as the Nature paper had suggested, but had indeed seen and benefited from Franklin's work without acknowledgment. The book was an immense success. When Crick first read the manuscript, he threatened to sue. Harvard University Press refused to publish it. Finally, it was modified to be kinder to Franklin, whom Watson had cruelly caricatured as an incompetent, obstructive feminist. But it still provoked a tremendous reaction among women crystallographers. Anne Sayre, a writer who knew Rosalind Franklin well, was asked to write a more accurate story that would do justice to her. This was eventually published as Rosalind Franklin and DNA in 1975, and it is a very good account (which Maddox inexplicably seems to slight). Sayre shows how appalling was the absence of acknowledgments of Franklin's work from almost all of the Watson and Crick papers, especially considering that in The Double Helix Watson described (only partially, of course) the use made of Franklin's data.

What has happened to some of the key people in this drama? Wilkins, despite his Nobel Prize, remains embittered about Rosalind Franklin. Certainly the circumstances of the Prize cast a considerable shadow on his glory. He is currently writing his own version of the events. Crick has carried out important work on genes and protein synthesis, and now pursues research on brain function at La Jolla. Watson is a great celebrity and enjoys this role. He is unrepentant about this part of his life, and revels in speaking about it. When he was interviewed for the obituary of Anne Sayre in The New York Times, Watson repeated his mantra: that Rosalind Franklin had not been a very good crystallographer. Aaron Klug has been a hero throughout the story. He has published two important papers in Nature to clarify Franklin's scientific role in solving the DNA structure. He also received a Nobel Prize for his work in structural biology; in his acceptance speech, he credited Franklin for her pioneering work in tackling large and difficult biological problems.

The playing field was not level for Franklin in the 1950s. As Sayre and now Maddox have shown, she suffered greatly at King's College from the knowledge that she was undervalued and even ridiculed. When she started her own research group at Birkbeck College, the atmosphere was somewhat more supportive, but to obtain funding for her group she had to deal with the Secretary of the Agricultural Research Council, Sir William Slater, who appears to have been both a misogynist and an anti-Semite.(1) Maddox deals with these issues very well, and her account of Franklin's last years and premature death is moving and poignant. This excellent biography provides a cogent example of how hard-won feminist goals continue to be. <@rdingbat>

1 Abir-Am, Pnina. "The Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of Molecular Biology," Nature Reviews in Molecular Cell Biology, Vol. 3: 65-70 (January, 2002).

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Downward mobility
From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies by Carmen Teresa Whalen. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001, 309 pp.,

Reviewed by Laura Briggs

Philadelphia Young Lord Wilfredo "Hawkeye" Rojas serving breakfast to children at the Lighthouse Settlement, 1971. From From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia.

SOME OF THE MOST consistently radical work these days is coming out of Latino Studies, which pursues questions of colonialism, nationalism, migration and political movements in ways that deepen our understanding of globalization. Carmen Teresa Whalen's ambitious new study, one of a burgeoning bookshelf of smart and exciting books by feminists working in Latino Studies, explores the experience particularly of Puerto Rican women in that first mass migration of workers after World War Two.

Women's history has struggled with how to tell stories of racialization, labor and migration, partly because these narratives are community stories, simultaneously about women and not. Whalen works hard to move back and forth between stories of male laborers, households and regional economies on the one hand, and the particularities of Puerto Rican women's experience on the other. A member of the radical Puerto Rican political group, the Young Lords, wrote in 1971, "The basic criticism we have of our sisters in Women's Liberation is that they shouldn't isolate themselves, because in isolating yourselves from your brothers…you're making the struggle separate--that's again another division, the same way that capitalism has divided Blacks from Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans from whites, and Blacks from whites."(1) Like the women of the Lords before her, Whalen succeeds admirably at making women and feminism an integral part of the story of Puerto Rican struggles.

The book follows a discouraging trajectory. Working-class Puerto Ricans survived the steady dissolution of the economies of the island's rural communities--a process, if not hastened by development projects, certainly not helped by them--until the virtually complete disappearance of their livelihoods forced them to move to the mainland. There, in spite of racism, exclusion from housing and employment, and street violence, they survived, building sturdy communities and mutual aid organizations. Then the steady erosion of employment opportunities started all over again, this time through deindustrialization, hastened or at least not helped by third world development projects offering complex tax holidays or other incentives to relocate jobs. This time there was nowhere for Puerto Ricans to go. Instead, many worked informal jobs, collected unemployment, went on relief and were treated as pariahs whose "Latin" culture made them unwilling to work, an "underclass" with a "culture of poverty."

In spite of this discouraging narrative, there is plenty of joy, music and good food in the book. Whalen relies extensively on oral history materials and offers a sense of the texture of everyday life alongside her detailed statistical picture of the economies of Puerto Rico and Philadelphia. Her interviews with women and men who migrated to Philadelphia in the post-war period give a picture of Puerto Rican women's labor-force participation unavailable in published sources--whether policy-makers' and regional planners' grotesque "culture of poverty" caricature of Puerto Rican matriarchs and welfare queens, or histories that tend to gloss over women migrants' lives. Many, many Puerto Rican women worked in the garment industry and in other factories, as domestics and as social workers. Men found mostly farm labor. They shared what Whalen calls "a plethora of limited opportunities"--low-wage jobs with no benefits, often seasonal work with no security.

AT FIRST, WORK WAS EASY to find. As one woman Whalen interviewed reported, garment work was there for the asking:

Sometimes, when you come from Puerto Rico, you're nostalgic to return to your country to see the place, to be there. I thought I was going to stay [on the island], but it wasn't like that, because you couldn't get work, and I came back here." Four days after returning to Philadelphia, she started working in another garment factory. She described her employment pattern: "Then I went to Puerto Rico, I returned, and continued in the same factory. I worked in different factories. Then when I had the children--since there were a lot--I worked with three, but when the fifth one came I had to leave [work]. But when they went to school, I returned to work, and I retired as a machine operator…every time I wanted to work, I could work. (pp. 146-147)

Philadelphia's Puerto Rican senior citizens march, singing, to their new senior citizens' center, 1983. From From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia.

Many early migrants left the island for Philadelphia on labor contracts. Mainland employers, particularly in agriculture, would go to Puerto Rico to recruit laborers and pay their airfare--often both ways, for they were welcome as workers, but unwelcome as residents. Intriguingly, most of the men Whalen spoke with preferred to come por su cuento, paying their own way, even when they intended to return to Puerto Rico at the end of the season. It's a striking story for those persuaded by economists that people behave to maximize their economic well-being; it made terrible economic sense to fly to the US on one's own dime. But there is not a trace of regret in the words Whalen records; although contracts offered steadier work and the price of a round-trip plane fare, Puerto Rican workers were fiercely independent, willing to spend a great deal to control the conditions of their labor.

Puerto Rican migrants to Philadelphia faced formidable barriers to employment. Dońa Carmen recalled: "Housing was very scarce. There wasn't housing because it was all white, it was white, all of the streets white, the houses…They didn't want to rent houses to others. So, even me, I didn't get an apartment… 'No, no, no, no, we don't want no children.' It was not the children like they said, it was more the color."

An attitude survey from this period measured just how disliked and unwelcome Puerto Ricans were by their white neighbors: there was actually more anti-Puerto Rican racism than Puerto Ricans themselves believed. Only the worst, lowest-paid jobs were available to them. Workers at the welfare offices, hospitals and other public services refused to deal with Spanish-speaking clients, meaning that even simple negotiations required finding and bringing a translator.

At the same time, leaving Puerto Rico was less a choice than a necessity. Whalen explores the fate of employment in two rural communities--Salinas and San Lorenzo-the source of many Philadelphia migrants in the forties and fifties. (This rural focus is itself fascinating, since conventional accounts have it that it was city-dwellers who migrated.) One woman Whalen interviewed, Dońa Nilda, acutely regretted the way of life her family lost when they could no longer make ends meet in Salinas. "Life before, even though we were poor and we didn't have a lot of good or expensive things, was better, much better than today. Because now, you work, you earn good money and everything, but there's more ruin." The "ruin," the everyday hassles of building households and raising children far from the island, made some--though hardly all--question whether it was worth the trip.

Unemployment chased their heels. Despite the heroic effort of moving to a strange, cold country, learning English, adjusting to urban life and reestablishing households, neighborhoods, friendships, social and political networks in a new place, Puerto Rican migrants to Philadelphia faced job flight all over again in the seventies. As their economic status shifted, Puerto Ricans were no longer seen through the ideological lens of the "culture of poverty" but through that of the "underclass." Paradoxically, this period also saw the political awakening of the community, as a generation of young Puerto Ricans raised in Philadelphia came of age, and the Lords, inspired among others by the Black Panthers, began to fight some of the entrenched racism that their parents had encountered. They started a breakfast program for children, ran a clothing drive, organized tuberculosis testing and volunteered at a local health clinic. At times, they went head to head with the police over brutality. As Young Lord Wilfredo Rojas told Whalen, "A lot of folks thought that we were crazy for challenging the system, but it wasn't a question of being crazy. It was a question of gaining respect."

Whalen shares their sense of the injustices done to that generation of Puerto Rican migrants, and the awareness that the racial ideologies that shaped their lives continue to haunt Puerto Ricans today. She's given us a readable account that presents their stories in their own words, while contextualizing their lives in the way social historians do best: developing the comprehensive, detailed statistical pictures that uncover the broad trends not always obvious in individual lives. Whalen also pushes us to consider whether this is the direction that women's history needs to go if it wants to treat racism and migration seriously: telling community stories rather than focusing on women per se, and showing, rather than assuming, that gender is an important piece of how racism and colonialism are lived.

(1) Young Lords Party, Palante: Young Lords Party, pp. 50-51, cited in Jennifer Nelson, "'Abortions Under Community Control': Feminism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Reproduction Among New York City's Young Lords," Journal of Women's History, Vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 158.

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