About Oregon’s Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State
In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy "others," combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed civil liberties for many people in Oregon and the nation. Professor Kimberly Jensen will share research from her new book Oregon's Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century through the lens of gender, gender identity and presentation, ability, race, ethnicity, and class.
Exclusionary and invasive practices ranged from forced wartime registration of women and "enemy aliens" to the incarceration of women with sexually transmitted diseases, the use of deportations, forced sterilization at the Oregon State Hospital, and restrictive licensing laws directed at Japanese Americans. But some Oregonians, including women and gender nonconforming people, resisted the restrictions and challenges to their civil liberties. Their determination to maintain their rights and freedoms fueled movements for human rights, social justice, and dissent that still reverberate today.
Kimberly Jensen is professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University and a member of the executive and editorial boards of the Oregon Encyclopedia of History and Culture. She is the author of Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War and Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism.
