Lisa G Materson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1479610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa G Materson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa G |
| FAMILY NAME | Materson |
| SIGNATURE | MATERSON L G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California System |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4772-6250 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 293 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 16 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Solidarity of Citizenship
This article traces Laura Meneses’s anticolonial activism in defense of Puerto Rico’s independence through her shifting citizenship and hemispheric residences. Born a Peruvian citizen in 1894, Meneses became a U.S. citizen in 1922 upon marrying pro-independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos, but she became stateless in 1948 when the U.S. government revoked her citizenship. In response, Meneses fashioned her marriage and her solidarity networks towar…
Ruth Reynolds, Solidarity Activism, and the Struggle Against U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico
Ruth Reynolds dedicated her life to solidarity activism for Puerto Rico’s independence that was grounded in exposing her fellow “continentals” to the discrepancy between the United States’s democratic ideals and its subjugation of Puerto Rico. Reynolds’s transformation into a leading voice of the US solidarity movement for Puerto Rico’s independence began after she moved to New York as a young woman in her twenties. The US government and the colo…
Women, Unfree Labor, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
This chapter focuses on various and comparative experiences of different populations of women in unfree labor systems in the early modern Atlantic world, beginning with indigenous women in the Americas who suffered the violent consequences of Spanish conquest. It discusses gendered contexts shaping slavery in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade; and the consequences for unfree and free women in…
Gender, Civil Rights, and the US Global Cold War
“Cold War” traditionally refers to the foreign policy, military, and ideological contestation between the power blocks of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Western powers of Europe and the United States. This chapter examines the ways women’s experiences and debates over gender, race, and sexuality were central to the US Cold War anticommunist policies and practices on the homefront and globally. This perspective reveals the …
US Feminisms and Their Global Connections
This chapter reinterprets the history of twentieth-century US feminism by foregrounding the importance of the global. Both international events and transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods have shaped the development of feminism in the United States. Recognizing the importance of the global foregrounds the diversity of political goals and political actors within movements for gender equality. Also, acknowledging US feminists’ engagement wi…
Interracial Sex, Marriage, and the Nation
This article traces the long history of legal regulations around interracial sex and marriage as tied to important changes in the territorial consolidation and political formation of the American nation and its polity. These regulations stabilized ambiguous racial categories and gender roles as well as patriarchy and heteronormativity. The article begins in the colonial era to survey the range of local practices of interracial sex, marriage, and …
Gender, the Body, and Disability
This chapter brings together the histories of American beauty culture and disability to identify overlaps between the fields and encourage women’s and gender historians to engage disability studies in their scholarship. “Unruly bodies,” bodies that fall outside the norm because of race, ethnicity, or disability, became the object of social and cultural derision and labeled ugly, abnormal and disabled. The techniques women, surgeons, fashion desig…
Women’s Rights, Suffrage, and Citizenship, 1789–1920
The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national p…
Manhood and the US Republican Empire
This chapter shows how republican and imperial grammars of manhood, and the gender order in which they were embedded, defined boundaries of civic and political inclusion in three areas of United States law and policy: the military, land and labor, and immigration. In each, specific models of labor, marriage, and domestic life defined manliness, conferring full privileges of citizenship on some men but denying it to others. Even as they generated …
Women, Gender, and Conservatism in Twentieth-Century America
Women have participated in conservative movement politics throughout the twentieth century. From opposition mounted against Progressive-era health and welfare legislation to protests against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to culture war battles with feminists, conservative women have never completely ceded the right side of the political spectrum to men. Essentialist notions of what is “natural” to women, their bodies, and their connection to chil…
Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century
This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled t…
Women and World War in Comparative Perspective
This chapter compares women’s experiences in World War I and World War II, emphasizing the ways that wartime mobilization shaped the citizenship claims, cultural representations, labor experiences, military contributions, and sexual expression of diverse groups of women. It focuses on how women applied their gendered, racialized, and classed bodies to wartime experiences that often put them at odds with propaganda images of femininity. The wartim…
Women, Trade, and the Roots of Consumer Societies
This chapter explains the significant, if often overlooked, ways in which both free and enslaved women as well as men participated actively and eagerly in trade around the Atlantic rim from 1500 to 1800. Commerce in the early modern period was not performed by heroic individuals or anonymous empires but by individuals embedded in familial and social relationships. The meanings that contemporaries accorded to female traders changed over time. With…
Women, Gender, and American History
This chapter analyzes the methods, sources, and relationship between women’s and gender history, arguing American women’s and gender history is its own interpretation of American history, focused on how ideas about women and gender shaped people’s lives as they participated in the processes of migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, community-building, and political mobilization. It explores the field as an integrated one tha…
Public and Print Cultures of Sex in the Long Nineteenth Century
The explosion of print culture and the advent of female authors and readers created the foundation for important changes in sexual practices and sexual mores across the long nineteenth century, influencing attitudes toward female pleasure, romantic love, courtship, marriage, and same-sex eroticism. This chapter focuses on female creators of sexual knowledge who worked to change legal practices and social customs by posing alternatives to indissol…
The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History
The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, coloni…
Women, Gender, Migration, and Modern US Imperialism
The United States as an empire—first spreading over the continent and then abroad—depended on ideas about the proper role of women, men, and families. Even before the United States began acquiring territory overseas, American women engaged in reform efforts abroad as missionaries and political activists. The presence of Anglo-American women and children allowed invading settlers across the continent to alternatively cast themselves as innocent vi…
African American Urban Electoral Politics in the Age of Jim Crow
This article reviews the literature on black politics in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that with notable exceptions, the expanding corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of African Americans. This critique of recent scholarship frames and introduces four articles in this s…
Gender Frontiers and Early Encounters
Gender frontiers are but one starting point for comparing cultural contact zones and analyzing imperialism and racial formation in the early modern Atlantic. Recent scholarship on Native American and African encounters with Europeans suggests a need for a more complex analytical framework. Africans and Native Americans participated actively in creating this cultural frontier—by persisting in, adjusting, or transforming precontact practices or by …
Gender, Generation, and Women's Independence Organizing in Puerto Rico
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…
An Army of Lions
In his excellent study, Shawn Leigh Alexander recovers the history of civil rights organizations that emerged in the United States between the 1880s and 1909 and that “laid the institutional, ideological, and political groundwork for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in 1909” (p. xii). These organizations included the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the C…
For the Freedom of Her Race
"Focusing on Chicago and downstate Illinois politics during the incredibly oppressive decades between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 - a period that is often described as the nadir of black life in America - Lisa Materson illuminates the impact that migrating southern black women had on midwestern and national politics, first in the Republican Party and later in the Democratic Party." "Mate…
African American women's global journeys and the construction of cross-ethnic racial identity
Women, Gender, Migration, and Modern US Imperialism
The United States as an empire—first spreading over the continent and then abroad—depended on ideas about the proper role of women, men, and families. Even before the United States began acquiring territory overseas, American women engaged in reform efforts abroad as missionaries and political activists. The presence of Anglo-American women and children allowed invading settlers across the continent to alternatively cast themselves as innocent vi…
African American women's global journeys and the construction of cross-ethnic racial identity
Gender Frontiers and Early Encounters
Gender frontiers are but one starting point for comparing cultural contact zones and analyzing imperialism and racial formation in the early modern Atlantic. Recent scholarship on Native American and African encounters with Europeans suggests a need for a more complex analytical framework. Africans and Native Americans participated actively in creating this cultural frontier—by persisting in, adjusting, or transforming precontact practices or by …
An Army of Lions
In his excellent study, Shawn Leigh Alexander recovers the history of civil rights organizations that emerged in the United States between the 1880s and 1909 and that “laid the institutional, ideological, and political groundwork for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in 1909” (p. xii). These organizations included the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the C…
For the Freedom of Her Race
"Focusing on Chicago and downstate Illinois politics during the incredibly oppressive decades between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 - a period that is often described as the nadir of black life in America - Lisa Materson illuminates the impact that migrating southern black women had on midwestern and national politics, first in the Republican Party and later in the Democratic Party." "Mate…
African American women's global journeys and the construction of cross-ethnic racial identity
An Army of Lions
In his excellent study, Shawn Leigh Alexander recovers the history of civil rights organizations that emerged in the United States between the 1880s and 1909 and that “laid the institutional, ideological, and political groundwork for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in 1909” (p. xii). These organizations included the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the C…
Gender, Generation, and Women's Independence Organizing in Puerto Rico
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…
Women, Unfree Labor, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
This chapter focuses on various and comparative experiences of different populations of women in unfree labor systems in the early modern Atlantic world, beginning with indigenous women in the Americas who suffered the violent consequences of Spanish conquest. It discusses gendered contexts shaping slavery in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade; and the consequences for unfree and free women in…
Gender, Civil Rights, and the US Global Cold War
“Cold War” traditionally refers to the foreign policy, military, and ideological contestation between the power blocks of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Western powers of Europe and the United States. This chapter examines the ways women’s experiences and debates over gender, race, and sexuality were central to the US Cold War anticommunist policies and practices on the homefront and globally. This perspective reveals the …
US Feminisms and Their Global Connections
This chapter reinterprets the history of twentieth-century US feminism by foregrounding the importance of the global. Both international events and transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods have shaped the development of feminism in the United States. Recognizing the importance of the global foregrounds the diversity of political goals and political actors within movements for gender equality. Also, acknowledging US feminists’ engagement wi…
Interracial Sex, Marriage, and the Nation
This article traces the long history of legal regulations around interracial sex and marriage as tied to important changes in the territorial consolidation and political formation of the American nation and its polity. These regulations stabilized ambiguous racial categories and gender roles as well as patriarchy and heteronormativity. The article begins in the colonial era to survey the range of local practices of interracial sex, marriage, and …
Gender, the Body, and Disability
This chapter brings together the histories of American beauty culture and disability to identify overlaps between the fields and encourage women’s and gender historians to engage disability studies in their scholarship. “Unruly bodies,” bodies that fall outside the norm because of race, ethnicity, or disability, became the object of social and cultural derision and labeled ugly, abnormal and disabled. The techniques women, surgeons, fashion desig…
Women’s Rights, Suffrage, and Citizenship, 1789–1920
The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national p…
Manhood and the US Republican Empire
This chapter shows how republican and imperial grammars of manhood, and the gender order in which they were embedded, defined boundaries of civic and political inclusion in three areas of United States law and policy: the military, land and labor, and immigration. In each, specific models of labor, marriage, and domestic life defined manliness, conferring full privileges of citizenship on some men but denying it to others. Even as they generated …
Women, Gender, and Conservatism in Twentieth-Century America
Women have participated in conservative movement politics throughout the twentieth century. From opposition mounted against Progressive-era health and welfare legislation to protests against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to culture war battles with feminists, conservative women have never completely ceded the right side of the political spectrum to men. Essentialist notions of what is “natural” to women, their bodies, and their connection to chil…
Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century
This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled t…
Women and World War in Comparative Perspective
This chapter compares women’s experiences in World War I and World War II, emphasizing the ways that wartime mobilization shaped the citizenship claims, cultural representations, labor experiences, military contributions, and sexual expression of diverse groups of women. It focuses on how women applied their gendered, racialized, and classed bodies to wartime experiences that often put them at odds with propaganda images of femininity. The wartim…
Women, Trade, and the Roots of Consumer Societies
This chapter explains the significant, if often overlooked, ways in which both free and enslaved women as well as men participated actively and eagerly in trade around the Atlantic rim from 1500 to 1800. Commerce in the early modern period was not performed by heroic individuals or anonymous empires but by individuals embedded in familial and social relationships. The meanings that contemporaries accorded to female traders changed over time. With…
Women, Gender, and American History
This chapter analyzes the methods, sources, and relationship between women’s and gender history, arguing American women’s and gender history is its own interpretation of American history, focused on how ideas about women and gender shaped people’s lives as they participated in the processes of migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, community-building, and political mobilization. It explores the field as an integrated one tha…
Public and Print Cultures of Sex in the Long Nineteenth Century
The explosion of print culture and the advent of female authors and readers created the foundation for important changes in sexual practices and sexual mores across the long nineteenth century, influencing attitudes toward female pleasure, romantic love, courtship, marriage, and same-sex eroticism. This chapter focuses on female creators of sexual knowledge who worked to change legal practices and social customs by posing alternatives to indissol…
The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History
The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, coloni…
Women, Gender, Migration, and Modern US Imperialism
The United States as an empire—first spreading over the continent and then abroad—depended on ideas about the proper role of women, men, and families. Even before the United States began acquiring territory overseas, American women engaged in reform efforts abroad as missionaries and political activists. The presence of Anglo-American women and children allowed invading settlers across the continent to alternatively cast themselves as innocent vi…
African American Urban Electoral Politics in the Age of Jim Crow
This article reviews the literature on black politics in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that with notable exceptions, the expanding corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of African Americans. This critique of recent scholarship frames and introduces four articles in this s…
Gender Frontiers and Early Encounters
Gender frontiers are but one starting point for comparing cultural contact zones and analyzing imperialism and racial formation in the early modern Atlantic. Recent scholarship on Native American and African encounters with Europeans suggests a need for a more complex analytical framework. Africans and Native Americans participated actively in creating this cultural frontier—by persisting in, adjusting, or transforming precontact practices or by …
Ruth Reynolds, Solidarity Activism, and the Struggle Against U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico
Ruth Reynolds dedicated her life to solidarity activism for Puerto Rico’s independence that was grounded in exposing her fellow “continentals” to the discrepancy between the United States’s democratic ideals and its subjugation of Puerto Rico. Reynolds’s transformation into a leading voice of the US solidarity movement for Puerto Rico’s independence began after she moved to New York as a young woman in her twenties. The US government and the colo…
The Solidarity of Citizenship
This article traces Laura Meneses’s anticolonial activism in defense of Puerto Rico’s independence through her shifting citizenship and hemispheric residences. Born a Peruvian citizen in 1894, Meneses became a U.S. citizen in 1922 upon marrying pro-independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos, but she became stateless in 1948 when the U.S. government revoked her citizenship. In response, Meneses fashioned her marriage and her solidarity networks towar…
Political science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · History (12 works) · Race, History, and American Society (11 works) · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies (9 works) · Colonialism (7 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (6 works)