Columns:: Historian to present Charter Lecture about 1904 ‘childnapping’ incident

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 23, 2002

UGA again named one of America’s top public universities
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Administration building atrium named for business, civic leader
Rolling out the welcome mat
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Avian Medicine Professor Emeritus George ‘Buck’ Rowland dies at 64
Prof’s research is full of personality
Update: Private Giving
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Campus News

Historian to present Charter Lecture about 1904 ‘childnapping’ incident

By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu

When New York nuns took 40 Irish orphan children to live with Mexican Catholic families in a remote Arizona mining camp in 1904, they thought they were performing a humane and charitable act. What they sparked, instead, was a dark moment in American history: a violent racial and religious flare-up in which the children were kidnapped by a vigilante squad, the nuns were almost lynched, and the Catholic Church lost a Supreme Court battle to retrieve the orphans.
Historian Linda Gordon’s 1999 book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, about the largely forgotten incident was praised as an important contribution to understanding the clash of class, culture and race in America’s past. The book won the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history as well as several other awards.
Gordon, a widely published author in women’s history and 20th-century social movements, will recount the Arizona incident and its implications when she presents the fall semester Charter Lecture in the Chapel on Sept. 25 at 4 p.m.
Her talk, titled “Vigilantism and Childnapping in the Arizona Territory: Race and Family Values,” is open free to the public.
In describing how the Arizona town’s Anglo citizens felt they were “saving” the white children from Mexican influences, Gordon examines racial, economic and religious attitudes that still influence decisions today about what is in the “best interest” of children.
Themes of welfare, family and gender dominate the work of Gordon, professor of history at New York University and the Florence Kelley Professor of History and Vilas Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin.
Her book Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: The History of Birth Control in America, was a runner-up for the 1976 National Book Award.
Her 1988 book, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence, recounted the history of child abuse, child sexual abuse and wife-beating. That book won the American History Association’s Joan Kelly Prize.
Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, published in 1994, explained how the welfare program had come to be despised by both recipients and non-recipients. It won the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award.
Gordon’s most recent book, Dear Sisters: Dispatches from Women’s Liberation, edited with Ros Baxandall, uses essays and documents to provide a historical account of the women’s movement of the 1970s.

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