Social movements and the symbolism of public demonstrations: the 1874 Women's Crusade and German resistance in Richmond, Indiana

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1999 by James Clyde Sellman

In women's history, scholarship on the Crusade took a similar approach. Barbara Epstein, Ruth Bordin, and Jack S. Blocker, Jr., argued that the true significance of the Crusade was that, as Epstein wrote, "for the first time, groups of women pitted themselves against what they saw as institutions of male culture."(15) Apart from Blocker, however, they remained rather sketchy on the movement's demise.(16) Bordin viewed the end of the Crusade as a "sober second thought" in which the women's "wild fervor" was "tamed into a purposeful and productive movement."(17) Dannenbaum cited the role of municipal leaders in thwarting the movement in Cincinnati, and Blocker discussed the tactics of Crusade opponents as well as the structural limitations faced by the women themselves.(18) Nonetheless, the main emphasis in this scholarship has been on the women's own choices and intentions, but social groups and social movements are to a considerable extent shaped by forces beyond their control.(19) The Crusade involved more than the actions of women and, indeed, more than the responses of their opponents. Yet whether scholars have positioned themselves within the smoky, bustling saloons or amongst the pious ranks of the praying bands, what they have generally overlooked is the larger community stage on which the Crusade unfolded.

Since the Women's Crusade was emphatically a local, grass-roots phenomenon, a community-centered approach holds real promise for a fuller and more complex understanding, not only of this movement, but also of the process of movement-building, in general.(20) Focusing on a small community offers the additional advantage of providing access to what Clifford Geertz has termed "local knowledge," that set of cultural understandings and inferences available only through deep familiarity with a particular locale.(21) Finally, it affords an excellent opportunity to explore what Thomas Bender has called the "making of public culture."(22) As suggested in Bender's phrase, recent social history - in common with interpretive anthropology - has evidenced a growing concern with the active construction of social boundaries and cultural meanings.(23) One significant element in this process of construction involves public ritual.

Understanding a dynamic social movement like the Women's Crusade calls for interpretive concepts sensitive to the dramatic. In particular, I have drawn inspiration from anthropologists Milton B. Singer, James C. Scott, and Victor W. Turner. Singer, during field work in the Madras region of India, developed an awareness of what he termed "cultural performances" that included not only the plays or concerts of so-called high culture, but also activities usually classed as religion or ritual, such as "prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies."(24) Singer explained that each cultural performance "had a definitely limited time span, or at least a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance."(25) For Singer, such activities represented the most concrete observable units of the cultural structure."(26) Many have followed Singer's lead in interpreting cultural performances as symbolic texts with an important communicative role.(27) Thus far, anthropologists and social historians have concentrated on the more tightly scripted - carefully planned, repetitive and temporally limited - varieties of cultural performance, such as parades and community festivals.(28)