by Julie Greene
59.Beeks, “Conditions of Employment at Panama,” p. 17.
60.Easley to Taft, Aug. 6, 1907, NCF Papers, reel 376, Subject Files, Panama Canal.
61.Roosevelt to Easley, Aug. 10, 1907; Easley to Roosevelt, Aug. 14, 1907: both NCF Papers, reel 376.
62.Park to Smith, June 24, 1908, ICC Records, 28-A-5.
63.If their wives joined them, men received double their monthly pay in square footage. Joseph Bucklin Bishop and Farnham Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), pp. 177–78; see also Gerstle Mack, The Land Divided: A History of the Panama Canal and Other Isthmian Canal Projects (New York: Knopf, 1944), pp. 546–47; and McCullough, Path Between the Seas, pp. 470, 478–79.
64.Beeks, “Conditions of Employment at Panama,” p. 9.
65.Smith to Goethals, June 18, 1908, ICC Records, 28-A-5, pp. 2, 3, 4.
66.Ibid., pp. 8, 11, 16, 23.
67.“Interview with Mr. Jackson Smith,” NCF Papers, n.d., but apparently 1907.
68.Vice president, Panama Railroad Company, to Goethals, Sept. 24, 1907, ICC Records, 28-A-5.
69.“Civic Federation’s Report on Providence,” Providence Journal, reprinted in Star and Herald, Nov. 19, 1907; see also unsigned letter to the editor of the Journal, Nov. 21, 1907: both ICC Records, 28-A-5. Lady Helen Varick Boswell, confidential, to Beeks, Sept. 18, 1907, NCF Papers, reel 376; “What a Woman Saw in the Canal Zone,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1907, p. 3, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
70.See correspondence between Mitchell and Beeks on Aug. 27 and Aug. 30, 1907, NCF Papers, reel 376, Subject Files, Panama Canal.
71.For a complete index of ICC responses to Beeks’s report, including action taken or denied, see Col. Goethals to Lieut. H. F. Hodges, Sept. 27, 1907, ICC Records, 28-A-5; also “What a Woman Saw in the Canal Zone.” For the quotation regarding Beeks and segregation, see Hiram Slifer (general manager, Panama Railroad Company) to Goethals, April 2, 1908, ICC Records, 28-A-5.
72.On Smith’s resignation, see Bishop and Bishop, Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal, pp. 177–80.
73.Chatfield, Light on Dark Places at Panama, pp. 213, 244.
74.Ibid., pp. 138–39, 144, 189, 265–67.
75.Abbot, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, pp. 326–27.
CHAPTER SIX: THE WOMEN’S EMPIRE
1.Rose Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly! (Hollywood, Calif.: Pan Press, 1956), pp. 8, 17; Rose Van Hardeveld, “From 1906 to 1916,” in The American Woman on the Panama Canal: From 1904 to 1916, ed. Mrs. Ernest von Muenchow (Balboa Heights, Panama: Star and Herald, 1916), p. 10.
2.References to the Canal Zone being like “home” are common in contemporary articles and books. See, for example, William Inglis, “The Progress and Promise of the Work at Panama,” Harper’s Weekly 50 (1906), p. 1852: “Any American can live and work in the Canal Zone as safely as home.” Harriet Verner, a white American housewife in the Zone during the construction era, declared of her counterparts, “And then they made it home. . . . No woman, no home.” In Muenchow, American Woman on the Panama Canal, p. iv.
Similarly, in chapter 1, above, the Steam Shovel and Dredge compared a train ride across the Isthmus of Panama to “taking a summer ride through suburbs of Chicago.” The scholarship on women and empire is vast. Particularly influencing my notion of women’s role in building a home for their husbands is Rosemary Marangoly George, “Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home,” Cultural Critique 27 (Winter 1993–94), pp. 95–127. Other studies that have shaped my approach include Vicente L. Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines,” American Literature 67, no. 4 (Dec. 1995), pp. 630–66; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Lora Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 263–86; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Difference—Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, pp. 373–405; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992); Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988).
3.Address of Theodore Roosevelt to the Assembled Panama Canal Force, Colón, Nov. 16, 1906: “The Work You Have Done Here Will Remain for the Ages,” http://www.czbrats.com/Builders/speechTR.htm (accessed May 5, 2004); General Federation of Women’s Clubs, “Protection for the Wives of Panama Canal Employees,” n.d., Louise C. Bidwell Collection, MS 86-13, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
4.Contemporaries’ emphasis on U.S. women’s contributions to the canal project stands in stark contrast to their neglect by historians. One historian who focused attention on the white housewives of the Zone is Paul W. Morgan Jr., “The Role of North American Women in U.S. Cultural Chauvinism in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2000); David McCullough devotes a few pages to women, which is more than most scholars, in The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977). The bulk of research on the canal’s construction has approached it from the perspective of engineering, politics, and diplomacy, hence missing the significance of women’s participation.
5.On women’s work as “emotional labor” and the tendency for it to be invisible to others, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); for an application of this idea to twentieth-century flight attendants’ work, see Kathleen M. Barry, “ ‘Too Glamorous to Be Considered Workers’: Flight Attendants and Pink-Collar Activism in Mid-Twentieth-Century America,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3, no. 3 (Fall 2006), pp. 119–38. On white women’s relationship to colonial subjects on imperial sites, see the excellent collection edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
6.Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: ICC Press, 1912), pp. 16–23. According to the census, of 62,810 total inhabitants in the Zone, 9,770 were whites who had been born in the United States. Of these, roughly 1,300 were children fourteen years of age or younger, 6,700 were males aged fifteen or older, and 2,900 were females aged fifteen or older. Of the women aged fifteen and older, 1,767 were identified as married. There were a few hundred workingwomen in the Zone—for example, nurses, stenographers, and teachers—but they were almost always unmarried. Thus the 1,767 married white female U.S. citizens listed in the census were almost all living in the Zone as housewives. For other cases of white American women’s involvement in imperial projects, see Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity”; Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and on intimacy, gender, and empire, see the articles in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
7.Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, pp. 18, 20.
8.Ibid., p. 21.
9.Ibid., pp. 5, 68.
10.Van Hardeveld, “From 1906 to 1916,” p. 13. See also i
n Muenchow’s collection the essay by Mrs. Chas. C. J. Wirz, which notes that the first governor of the Canal Zone, General George Davis, actively opposed the presence of U.S. women in the Zone. “Some of My Experiences on the Isthmus of Panama,” p. 25.
11.Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, pp. 68, 87.
12.Beeks to William H. Taft, Jan. 17, 1908, Isthmian Canal Commission Records, RG 185, 28-A-5, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as ICC Records); “Panama Offers Good Chances to Women,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1907, p. SM11; Colonel Carrol A. Devol (Quartermaster’s Department) to Goethals, July 1, 1912, in Annual Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Fiscal Year Ending June 20, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), p. 378.
13.John Hall, “Mrs. Mac-Dasher,” in Panama Roughneck Ballads (Panama and Canal Zone: Albert Lindo, Panama Railroad News Agency, 1912), p. 30.
14.Elizabeth Kittredge Parker, Panama Canal Bride: A Story of Construction Days (New York: Exposition, 1955), pp. 44–45.
15.Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, pp. 68, 40.
16.Ibid., pp. 112–13.
17.Ibid., p. 49.
18.Ibid., pp. 49–50.
19.Ibid., pp. 26–27, 23, 34. Her husband similarly objectified his West Indian workers, referring to them as “grinning black monkeys.”
20.Ibid., pp. 39, 41–44.
21.Ibid., pp. 52–53. On domestic servants and their negotiations with female employers, see, for example, Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
22.Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, pp. 28, 33.
23.Rose Van Hardeveld, “Personal Experiences,” in Muenchow, American Woman on the Panama Canal, p. 14.
24.Van Hardeveld, Make the Dirt Fly!, pp. 91–95.
25.Ibid., pp. 83–85.
26.Ibid., pp. 85–87.
27.Parker, Panama Canal Bride, p. 34.
28.Ibid., pp. 27, 40.
29.Ibid., pp. 28, 36–37.
30.Ibid., pp. 37, 28, 30.
31.Van Hardeveld, “Personal Experiences,” p. 14.
32.Mary L. McCarty, Glimpses of Panama and of the Canal (Kansas City, Mo.: Tiernan-Dart, 1913),
pp. 130–31.
33.Parker, Panama Canal Bride, 76; Census of the Canal Zone, February 1, 1912, pp. 42–43.
34.Muenchow, American Woman on the Panama Canal. For an overview of social activities the Canal Record provides a fine source of information. On literary clubs, see Mary A. Chatfield, Light on Dark Places at Panama (New York: Broadway, 1908), passim. On patriotism and visits to the construction sites, see Morgan, “Role of North American Women in U.S. Cultural Chauvinism in the Panama Canal Zone,” p. 65.
35.Gertrude Beeks, “Conditions of Employment at Panama,” National Civic Federation Review, Oct. 1907, p. 12. See also Mary I. Wood, The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs for the First Twenty-Two Years of Its Existence (New York: History Department, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1912); Mildred White Wells, Unity in Diversity: The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (Washington, D.C.: General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1953); Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Defined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Ann Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Mary Jean Houde, Reaching Out: A Story of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (Chicago: Mobium, 1989); Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literary and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
36.On Boswell, see Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), ch. 3.
37.Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (1910), at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12226/12226-h/12226-h.htm (accessed July 8, 2005).
38.Boswell to Beeks, Sept. 23, 1907, National Civic Federation Papers, reel 376, Subject Files, New York Public Library; see also “Women’s Clubs in Panama,” National Civic Federation Review, Feb. 1908,
p. 24. On continuing reminders against exclusivity, and for more general coverage of the women’s club movement in the Canal Zone, see Morgan, “Role of North American Women in U.S. Cultural Chauvinism in the Panama Canal Zone,” pp. 87–108. My understanding of the subject here is indebted to Morgan’s dissertation.
39.See the weekly column titled “Social Life of the Zone” in the Canal Record for a detailed report of club events. For the activities discussed above, see in particular the issues of Oct. 30, 1907, p. 6; Jan. 1, 1908, p. 140; and April 29, 1908, p. 276.
40.The notion of “imagined communities” is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
41.Jeanette Ferris Brown, “Socials and Clubs,” in Muenchow, American Woman on the Panama Canal,
pp. 47–51.
42.“Women’s Clubs in Panama,” p. 24; Morgan, “Role of North American Women in U.S. Cultural Chauvinism in the Panama Canal Zone,” pp. 87–108. For information on women’s clubs and working-class issues in the United States, see Wells, Unity in Diversity; Priscilla Murolo, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs, 1884–1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
43.Beeks, “Conditions of Employment at Panama,” p. 4.
44.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, March 26, 1910, T. B. Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 30, Special Collections, Ablah Library, Wichita State University.
45.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, March 5, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 28. The Miskimon Papers at Wichita State University include many other examples of troubles with neighbors as well as child abuse and domestic violence.
46.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, Aug. 12, 1910, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 37.
47.Miskimon to Goethals, Oct. 30, 1909, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 16. On the history of domestic violence, see Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, Massachusetts, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988); Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Peterson, “Wife-Beating: An American Tradition,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 1 (Summer 1992), pp. 97–118.
48.Miskimon to Goethals, July 13, 1908, MS 86-5, box 1, folder 22; Miskimon to Goethals, May 13, 1909, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 9: both Miskimon Papers.
49.Chatfield, Light on Dark Places at Panama, pp. 139, 142, 152.
50.Miskimon to Goethals, memorandum, Aug. 26, 1910, and accompanying testimonies, Miskimon Papers, MS 86-5, box 2, folder 39; for other negative discussion of the commissaries, see Chatfield, Light on Dark Places at Panama, esp. p. 139.
51.Brady Owen v. Madeline Owen, May 1, 1911, case 96, Records of District Courts of the United States, RG21, District of the Canal Zone, 1st Judicial Circuit, Balboa, Civil Case Files, 1904–14, box 1, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
52.J. Frank McKeever v. Florence McKeever, July 18, 1910, case 82, and Willis E. Lyons v. Minnie E. Lyons, July 24, 1913, case 167, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 1st Judicial Circuit, Civil Case Files, 1904–14, box 1.
53.John W. Gray v. Cora Gray, May 17, 1910, case 393, Records of District Courts of the United States, District of the Canal Zone, 2nd Judicial Circuit, Empire, Gorgona, Ancon, Civil Case Files, 1904–14, box 6.
54.Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 86–89; Robert L. Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850–1890: Victorian Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), esp. pp. 78–79; Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of Cali
fornia Press, 1999); Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (Dec. 1998), pp. 1440–74; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
55.Little has been written on the lives of West Indian women in Panama or the Canal Zone. One of the best sources is Eyra Marcela Reyes Rivas, El trabajo de las mujeres en la historia de la construcción del Canal de Panamá, 1881–1914 (Panama: Universidad de Panamá, Instituto de la Mujer, 2000). See also Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jack L. Alexander, “Love, Race, Slavery, and Sexuality in Jamaican Images of the Family,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, ed. Raymond T. Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 147–80; Christine Barrow, Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996); Christine Barrow, ed., Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996); Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte, “Crisis, Contraculture, and Religion Among West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone,” in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Norman E. Whitten and Arlene Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 100–118; Ronald N. Harpelle, The West Indians of Costa Rica: Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic Minority (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Elizabeth McLean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850–1930 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988); Verene Shepherd, “Gender, Migration, and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post-Indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica, 1845–1943,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995), pp. 236–42.
